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MM. 


A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   PROSODY 


MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  LIMITED 

LONDON  •  BOMBAY  •  CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  •  BOSTON  •  CHICAGO 
ATLANTA  •  SAN  FRANCISCO 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  LTD. 

TORONTO 


A  HISTORY 


OF 


ENGLISH   PROSODY 

FROM   THE   TWELFTH   CENTURY   TO 
THE   PRESENT   DAY 


M.A.  OXON  J    HON.   LL.D.  ABERD.  ;    HON.   D.LITT.  DURH.  ;    PROFESSOR   OF    RHETORIC   AND 
ENGLISH   LITERATURE   IN   THE   UNIVERSITY  OF    EDINBURGH 


VOL.  II 
FROM  SHAKESPEARE   TO  CRAB  BE 


Maxima  and  minima.' — Mathematical  Treatise 


MACMILLAN   AND  CO.,  LIMITED 

ST.  MARTIN'S  STREET,  LONDON 

1908 


SRIS 
URL 


PREFACE 

NOT  many  prefatory  words  are,  I  think,  necessary  to  this 
volume.  I  have  indeed  to  acknowledge,  with  the  most 
sincere  thanks,  the  gratifying  and  almost  unhoped-for 
approval  given  by  some  competent  and  impartial  critics 
to  the  first.  Unfavourable  comment  seems  to  have 
very  mainly  reduced  itself  either  to  a  reiteration  of  the 
views  which  prefer  German  theory  to  English  fact,  or 
to  an  amplification  of  the  argument,  "  I  know  and  care 
very  little  about  this  subject  ;  therefore  nobody  has  any 
business  to  write  a  book,  and  especially  a  big  book,  on 
it."  This  latter  syllogism  is  perhaps  a  little  inconclusive  ; 
at  any  rate,  I  do  not  propose  to  rebut  it.  Nor  would 
it  be  of  much  use  to  cope  directly  with  those  whose 
prejudices  against  classical  nomenclature  and  quantitative 
valuation  lead  them  to  deny  the  possibility  of  "  scanning  " 
Shakespeare  and  Milton.  It  is  better  to  disprove  the 
impossibility  by  the  simple  expedient  of  going  and  doing 
it.  As  for  the  objection,  which  has  actually  been  made, 
that  this  book  will  not  make  poets  :  I  can  only  say,  "  God 
forbid  that  it  should  attempt  to  do  so  ! " 

One  point,  however,  is  of  too  much  importance  to 
be  wholly  omitted.  A  reviewer  in  The  Guardian  (of 
whom  I  have  no  complaint  to  make  on  the  whole,  and 
who  seemed,  indeed,  to  be  not  so  much  dissatisfied  with 
my  prosodic  conclusions  as  shocked  at  my  Chaucerian 
heresies)  commented  on  the  note  at  vol.  i.  p.  299 — 
respecting  the  more  than  probable  unconsciousness  of  early 


vi  PREFACE 

poets  as  to  their  prosodic  system — as  if  it  were  a  "hedge," 
a  kind  of  afterthought  on  discovering  inconveniences.  I 
can  assure  him  that  it  was  nothing  of  the  kind  :  but,  like 
other  similar  separated  notes,  intended  to  draw  special 
attention  to  an  important  point.  In  fact,  this  thing  happens 
to  be  the  hinge  and  staple  of  my  own  critical  and  prosodic 
apparatus.  Those  who  cannot  see  the  existence  and  the 
value  of  this  silent  testimony  are  in  much  the  same  plight 
with  the  assailants  of  formal  logic,  a  hundred  years  ago 
and  later,  who  asked  if  the  great  arguers  from  Demosthenes 
and  Plato  to  Burke  and  Bentham  reasoned  in  syllogism  ? 
The  retort,  of  course,  was,  that  though  every  good 
argument  is  not  syllogistically  expressed,  or  by  conscious- 
ness syllogistically  thought  out,  every  good  argument  is 
reducible  to  syllogism  ;  and  the  same,  mutatis  mutandis, 
is  the  reply  here. 

There  is  nothing  over  which  I  have  taken  more  pains 
than  the  method  of  this  volume  ;  and  I  may  respectfully 
beg  readers  not  to  judge  it  hastily  as  unmethodical.  In 
some  experience  of  writing,  and  a  very  great  experience 
of  reading,  literary  histories,  I  have  found  that  while  there 
are  the  usual  three  courses  of  apparent  and  self-justifying 
system  in  planning  these,  they  are  all,  if  too  rigidly  adhered 
to,  productive  of  great  inconveniences.  The  system  of 
proceeding  wholly  by  Kinds,  which  has  become  fashionable 
recently,  looks  very  "good  and  godly" — very  philosophical 
and  scientific ;  but  it  leads,  in  some  instances  at  any 
rate,  to  the  entire  destruction  of  all  historical  perspective 
and  mapping  out,  so  that  contemporary  work  is  separated 
by  hundreds  of  pages.  The  opposite  plan  of  adopting 
strict  chronological  slices,  of  leaving  an  author  in  the 
middle  of  his  career  without  ruth,  and  picking  him  up 
again  without  ceremony,  obviates  this  difficulty,  but 
substitutes  another.  You  get  no  complete  view  of  any 
writer  ;  you  have  to  patch  and  piece  him  together  from 


PREFACE  vii 

two  or  three  or  more  different  chapters  or  even  volumes  ; 
and  you  must  be  provided  with  a  very  clear  head,  a  very 
good  memory,  and  a  copious  supply  of  temper,  if  you  do 
not  get  either  irretrievably  muddled,  or  driven  out  of  all 
patience,  or  both.  If,  on  the  other  or  third  hand,  you 
proceed  by  authors  merely,  the  thing  becomes  rather  a 
dictionary  than  a  history  ;  and  there  is  the  danger — 
perhaps  the  most  insidious  of  all  because  it  is  somewhat 
latent — of  obscuring  the  coincidence  of  persons,  times, 
kinds,  and  works.  I  have  endeavoured  to  meet  all  these 
difficulties  by  adopting  no  one  of  the  three  ways  ex- 
clusively, and  proceeding  by  each  as  seems  to  me  most 
likely  to  give  the  general  sequence  of  things.  No  doubt 
this  too  is  difficult — I  daresay  I  have  failed  to  do  it 
perfectly  ;  but  I  am  sure  it  was  worth  attempting. 

Perhaps  I  should  give  instances.  I  have  dealt  together 
with  the  whole  prosody  of  Donne  and  of  Waller,  though 
in  each  case  part  of  it  falls  out  of  the  main  subject  of 
the  chapter  in  which  the  treatment  appears,  because  there 
is  an  important  connection,  and  one  which  concerns  that 
main  subject,  between  the  parts.  I  have  separated  the 
treatment  of  Cowley,  because  his  Pindarics  require,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  distinct  handling.  I  have  given  combined 
and  exclusive  treatment  to  the  whole  work,  multifarious 
as  it  is,  of  Shakespeare,  Milton,  and  Dryden,  because  each 
of  these  has  prosodic  importance  and  prosodic  idiosyncrasy 
which  seem  to  me  to  demand  this  treatment. 

But  enough  of  this  shadow-fighting  :  let  us  speak  once 
more  of  the  real  Eugenie  Grandet — of  Prosody  herself.1 

GEORGE  SAINTSBURY. 

BATH,  Maundy  Thursday,  1908. 


1  The  great  bulk  of  matter  which  has  to  be  dealt  with  in  this  volume  has 
made  it  necessary  to  suspend  the  Appendix  system  as  far  as  it  is  concerned. 
I  regret  this,  because  it  prevents  my  giving  certain  excursus  which  I  have 


viii  PREFACE 

already  prepared  to  meet  direct  requests,  such  as  one  on  the  question  "What 
is  a  foot  ?  "  and  another  on  the  point  whether  the  iamb  or  the  trochee  is  really 
the  staple  foot  of  English  poetry.  But  these  and  some  others  will  come 
with  greater  appropriateness  at  the  end  of  the  whole  inquiry  on  which  they 
are  based  ;  and  there  is  no  absolute  necessity  for  an  interim  survey  of  rhyme, 
etc.,  at  the  point  here  reached.  As  before,  I  have  to  give  the  heartiest 
thanks  to  Professors  Ker,  Elton,  and  Gregory  Smith,  for  reading  my  proofs, 
and  for  making  many  valuable  suggestions. 


CONTENTS 

BOOK  V 
THE   TIME    OF    SHAKESPEARE 

CHAPTER    I 

SHAKESPEARE   AND   BLANK   VERSE 

PAGE 

Retrospect  of  Chaucer,  Surrey,  etc. — The  line  of  the  University  Wits 
— Shakespeare — The  order  to  be  taken  with  his  work — Titus 
Andronicus — The  Comedy  of  Errors — Love's  Labour's  Lost — The 
Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona — Romeo  and  Juliet — A  Midsummer 
Nighfs  Dream— All's  Well  that  Ends  ffW/— The  Early  Histories 
and  their  Doubles — King  John — The  "Doubles"  generally — 
Henry  VI.— Richard  III.— Henry  IV.— Richard  II.— The 
Merchant  of  Venice — The  later  plays — The  Tempest — The  later  (?) 
Comedies — The  Merry  Wives — Measure  for  Measure — As  You 
Like  It— Taming  of  the  Shrew— Twelfth  Night— Much  Ado— The 
Winter's  Tale — The  other  English  Histories — Henry  V. — Henry 
VIII. — Troilus  and  Cressida — Timon  of  Athens — Coriolamts — 
Julius  C&sar — Antony  and  Cleopatra — The  Four  Great  Tragedies 
— Macbeth — Hamlet — King  Lear —  Othello —  Cymbeline — Pericles 
— General  considerations — The  pause — The  trisyllabic  foot  and 
its  revival — The  redundant  syllable — Enjambment — The  morpho- 
logy and  biology  of  blank  verse—  The  Poems —  Venus  and  Adonis 
— Lucrece — The  Sonnets — Miscellaneous  metres  :  the  octosyllable 
— Decasyllabic  couplets — The  Songs — Note  on  The  Passionate 
Pilgrim,  etc.  .......  3 

CHAPTER    II 

THE   OTHER    "ELIZABETHAN"    DRAMATISTS 

The  shortness  of  the  blank-verse  season — And  its  causes — The  prac- 
titioners —  Jonson  —  Chapman  —  Marston  —  Dekker  —  Webster — 
Rowley — Middleton —  Hey  wood — Tourneur  —  Day — The  minors 
— General  remarks — Note  on  Shakespearian  "  Doubtful  "  Plays  .  67 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER    III 

THE   CONTEMPORARIES    AND    FOLLOWERS    OF   SPENSER    IN 
STANZA    AND   COUPLET 

Retrospect  on  Spenser's  comparative  position  —  Dyer — Raleigh — 
Greville — Sidney — The  Arcadia  verse — Astrophel  and  Stella,  etc. 
— Marlowe — Drayton — The  Polyolbion — His  narrative  stanzas — 
His  couplet — His  lyrics — Daniel — Davies — Chapman — His  minor 
metres — His  fourteener — Its  predecessors — Phaer,  Golding,  etc. 
— Southwell  and  Warner — Chapman's  comments  on  his  own  verse 
— Jonson — The  Fletchers — Giles — Phineas — Browne — His  deal- 
ings with  Occleve — His  "sevens" — His  enjambed  couplet — 
Wither — His  longer  couplet  in  "  Alresford  Pool  " — His  shorter — 
Sylvester  and  Basse — The  Scottish  Jacobeans — Ayton,  Ker,  and 
Hannay — Drummond — Stirling — Note  on  the  Satirists 


CHAPTER    IV 

ELIZABETHAN    LYRIC   AND    SONNET — DONNE 

Contents  of  chapter — The  Phcenix  Nest — England's  Helicon  and  Davi- 
son's  Poetical  Rhapsody — Music  and  prosody — The  Songs  from 
the  Plays — Those  from  the  Romances — And  from  the  Song-books 
— Campion — His  "  versings  " — His  rhymed  poems — The  Sonnet- 
outburst — Community  of  its  phenomena — Instance  from  Zepheria 
— And  of  its  goodness — Method  of  operation — Licences  and  varia- 
tions— In  line-length — In  line-number — Other  freaks — Canzons, 
madrigals,  etc. — Barnes — The  moral  of  sonnet  and  song — Jonson's 
lyrics  —  The  Celia  Song  —  The  epitaphs  —  Others  —  The  In 
Memoriam  metre — The  problem  of  Donne — His  double  prosodic 
aspect — The  anarchy  of  the  Satires — The  "middle"  poems — The 
lyrics  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .130 

CHAPTER    V 

PROSODISTS 

A  new  subject  of  study — The  attraction  of  classical  metres — Note  on 
Hawes's  Example  of  Virtue — The  "craze"  for  them  in  English 
— Ascham — The  contempt  of  rhyme — Freaks  of  the  craze — Drant 
— Harvey  and  Spenser — Stanyhurst — "Quantity" — Sidney's 
silence — Webbe — Nash  —  Puttenham  — Campion's  Observations 
— Daniel's  Defence — The  Mirror  for  Magistrates  once  more — 
Lesson  of  its  prosodic  freaks  — Of  the  prose  discussions — Of  its  later 
editions — Gascoigne's  Notes  of  Instruction — Note  on  King  James's 
Rewlis  and  Cautelis — Chapman,  Jonson,  Drayton  .  .167 

INTERCHAPTER  V  .      196 


CONTENTS 


BOOK    VI 
LATER    JACOBEAN    AND   CAROLINE    POETRY 

CHAPTER    I 

MILTON 

PAGE 

Studies  of  Milton's  prosody  frequent — Reasons  for  this — The  early 
minor  pieces — The  Nativity  Hymn — The  Arcades,  etc. — Note 
on  Translations,  note — The  octosyllabic  group — The  Sonnets — 
Lycidas — Originality  of  its  form — Compared  with  Spenser — 
Analysis — Rationale  of  the  system — The  blank  verse — Comus — 
Paradise  Lost — The  abjuration  of  rhyme — Examination  of  the 
verse — Apostrophation — Paradise  Regained — Samson  Agonistes — 
Attempts  to  systematise  apparent  anomaly — Mr.  Bridges'  view — 
Discussion  of  it — Contrast  of  it  with  our  system — The  printing 
argument — Cacophonies — The  "  scanned  not  pronounced  "  argu- 
ment— Classical  parallels  and  comparisons — The  true  prosodic 
position  of  Milton — Conclusion  on  uncontentious  points  .  207 

CHAPTER    II 

THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS 

The  main  currents  of  mid-seventeenth-century  prosody — The  use  of 
the  couplet — The  pioneers — Fairfax — Sir  John  Beaumont — Sandys 
— The  first  main  practitioners — Waller — Characteristics  of  his 
smoothness — His  other  metres — Their  moral  as  to  the  couplet — 
Cowley — His  curious  position — His  couplet  generally — The 
Davideis — His  own  principles — His  lyrics — Denham — The  oppo- 
site or  enjambed  form — Chalkhill,  Marmion,  and  Chamberlayne — 
The  constitutive  difference  of  the  two  styles — Dangers  of  enjamb- 
ment — Note  on  the  two  couplets  .  .  .  .273 

CHAPTER    III 

THE   DECAY   OF    DRAMATIC    BLANK    VERSE 

Beaumont  and  Fletcher — Their  taste  for  redundance — Their  attitude  to 
their  licences — Massinger — Ford — Shirley — Randolph — Brome — 
Davenport — Nabbes — Glapthorne — The  actual  debacle — Suckling 
— Davenant — The  problem — And  its  answer — Further  instances — 
Goff  and  Cokain — Nero  and  The  Martyred  Soldier — Rebellion 
— Andromana  —  Divers  Caroline  plays  compared  with  Lust's 
Dominion  .......  302 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER    IV 

CAROLINE   LYRIC,    PINDARIC,    AND   STANZA 


PAGE 


Special  character  of  this  lyric — And  special  influence  of  Jonson  and 
Donne  —  Some  general  characteristics  —  Special  metres — The 
Caroline  C.M. — L.M.  and  In  Memoriam  quatrains — The  pure 
or  mixed  trochaic  measures — Herrick — Carew — Crashaw — George 
Herbert — Vaughan — Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury — Marvell — The 
general — Digression  on  "  Phillida  flouts  me  "and  foot-division — 
"  Pindaric  " — Its  rise  in  Cowley  and  its  nature — The  inducements 
to  it — Furor  poeticus,  etc. — Its  intrinsic  attractions — Its  history 
— Cowley's  own  practice — The  decay  of  stanza — The  quatrain  .  321 

CHAPTER    V 

PROSODISTS 

Barrenness  of  the  compartment — Jonson  a  defaulter — Joshua  Poole  or 

«J.  D."  .     344 

INTERCHAPTER   VI    ..  .  -349 


CHAPTER     I 

DRYDEN 

Variety  of  Dryden's  metres — His  general  prosodic  standpoint — His 
practice — The  Hastings  elegy — The  Heroic  Stanzas — Astraa 
Redux  and  its  group — Annus  Mirabilis — The  couplet  in  the 
heroic  plays — Its  changes — And  conversion  to  blank — Dryden's 
blank  verse — His  lyrics — Other  songs — The  Odes — The  Hymns, 
etc. — The  couplet  in  the  Translations — In  the  later  poems 
generally — The  Prologues,  etc. — The  Satires — The  didactic  and 
narrative  pieces — Triplets  and  Alexandrines — Note  on  Alexandrines 
in  continuous  verse  ......  359 

CHAPTER    II 

CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN   IN   LYRIC,   PINDARIC,   AND  COUPLET 

Arrangement — Relation  in  form  to  predecessors — "  Orinda  " — Aphra 
Behn — Sedley — Rochester — Dorset — Others — Otway — Halifax — 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Mulgrave — Congreve — Walsh — The  later  Pindarics — Sprat,  Watts, 
etc. — Otway  again — Swift — Yalden — Congreve  again — Couplet 
verse — The  minor  heroic  dramatists  and  the  satirists — Roscommon 
— Mulgrave  again — Others — Pomfret  ....  393 


CHAPTER    III 

THE   OCTOSYLLABLE   AND   THE   ANAP^ST — BUTLER,    SWIFT, 
AND   PRIOR 

Hudibrastics  "  and  Hudibras — Their  congeniality — The  rhymes — 
Improper  use  of  the  name — Practice  of  the  metre  before  and  after 
1700 — Swift  :  his  octosyllables — The  anapaest — Retrospect  of  it — 
Examples  up  to  "Mary  Ambree" — And  "A  Hundred  Years 
Hence  " — Remarks  on  this — Prior — His  relation  to  the  couplet — 
His  prosodic  remarks — His  Pindaric — His  "  improved  "  Spenserian 
— His  octosyllables — His  anapaests — The  charm  of  the  metre — 
Other  points  in  him — His  double  rhymes  .  .  .413 


CHAPTER    IV 

PROSODISTS 

Continued  poverty  of  the  subject — Dryden — Mulgrave,   Roscommon, 

etc.         .  .     436 

INTERCHAPTER   VII  .  .     440 


BOOK   VIII 
THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

CHAPTER    I 

POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET 

Pope's  metrical  unitarianism — His  couplet,  and  its  form — The  " gradus 
epithet  " — The  Pastorals — The  Messiah  and  Windsor  Forest — 
The  Essay  on  Criticism  and  The  Rape  of  the  Lock — The  Elegy  on 
an  Unfortunate  Lady — Eloisa  to  Abelard — Interim  comparison 
with  Dryden — The  Homer — The  Essays  and  Satires — Their  value 
as  chasteners — Pope  in  other  measures — After  Pope — Johnson — 
The  partial  return  to  Dryden — Savage — Churchill — Goldsmith 
— Crabbe — Sir  Eustace  Grey,  etc. — The  heroics — Cowper — His 
early  poems — Table  Talk,  etc. — Tirocinium  .  .  .  447 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER    II 

BLANK   VERSE   AFTER   MILTON 

PAGE 

The  meaning  of  "after" — Roscommon — John  Philips — Broome  and 
Fenton — Addison,  Watts,  and  others — Gay  and  Prior — Thomson 
— Somerville — Armstrong — Young — Digression  on  dramatic  blanks 
— Southerne — Congreve,  Rowe,  and  Addison — Exaltation  of 
the  soliloquy — Return  to  Night  Thoughts — Akenside — Blair — 
Glover — Cowper — Early  blank  verse — The  Task — Yardley  Oak  .  473 


CHAPTER    III 

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY   LYRIC,    ETC. 

Preliminaries — The  Transition — Addison,  Parnell,  and  Rowe — Hughes 
— Gay — Granville,  etc. — Watts — Byrom — Shenstone — Spenserian 
imitation — Akenside — Smart — Collins — The  "Ode  to  Evening" 
— The  others — Gray — The  "  Elegy  "  and  the  minor  Odes — The 
two  great  Odes,  etc. — Note,  Mason  —  Goldsmith — Cowper — 
Chatterton — The  Ballad — The  1723  Collection — The  Reliques — 
Evans — Some  minor  lyrics — The  hymn-writers — Charles  Wesley 
— Toplady — Cowper  again — Later  eighteenth  -  century  anapaest 
and  octosyllable — Dyer  and  Anstey  .  .  .500 


CHAPTER    IV 

PROSODISTS 

Revival  of  prosodic  study — Bysshe — The  rigour  of  the  syllabic  game — 
Importance  of  this — Watts — Gildon — Brightland,  etc. — Pember- 
ton,  Mainwaring,  Harris — Say  and  Home — Burnet,  Tucker, 
Herries — Sheridan — Steele — Tyrwhitt  —  Walter  Young —  Nares 
and  Fogg — The  Upper  House:  Shenstone — On  "long "rhymes 
— On  "dactyls" — Gray — His  Metrum  notes — Johnson — "  Deca- 
syllabomania  "  in  him  and  others — His  arguments  on  pause — 
Note  on  Goldsmith,  note — John  Mason — Mitford  .  -536 

INTERCHAPTER   VIII  .  .  .  .  .567 


ADDENDA  AND  CORRIGENDA  FOR  VOL  I. 


Page  xvii. — In  strictness  I  should  have  included  in  the  list  of  feet 
the  Proceleusmatic,  or  double  pyrrhic,  w  ^  w  w.  I  do  not,  however,  believe 
that  this  is  possible  in  English  verse,  even  as  a  combination  ;  and 
in  prose  I  should  feel  inclined,  if  it  occurred  anywhere,  to  merge 
it  in  a  dochmiac. 

Page  179,  note. — I  was  very  sorry  to  learn  that  this  note  was 
misunderstood  by  some  readers  as  meaning  that  Professor  Skeat 
had  not  printed  the  three  texts  of  Langland  apart  from  each 
other,  and  that  Whitaker's  was  the  only  one  in  which  C  could  be 
read  alone.  Even  now  I  hardly  know  how  to  remedy  the  matter,  for 
the  note  seems  to  me  quite  clear.  It  means — 

That  in  Dr.  Skeat's  Clarendon  Press  edition  the  three  texts  appear 
on  the  same  page  or  page-opening  ; 

That  in  his  E.E.T.S.  edition  they  all  appear,  but  are  separately 
printed ; 

That  Whitaker's  contains  C  without  A  or  B  in  any  form  or  place  ; 

Wright's  is  of  course,  B,  with  a  certain  proportion  of  A  and  C 
variants. 

Page  245. — I  might,  and  perhaps  should,  have  added  here  or  at 
p.  264,  the  alchemical  poets  Norton  and  Ripley,  Bradshaw's  Life  of 
St.  Werburgh,  Ashby's  Poems,  and  one  or  two  others.  They  have, 
however,  nothing  really  new  for  us  except  to  illustrate  additionally 
the  break-up  of  the  line  and  the  degradation,  more  especially,  of 
rhyme-royal. 

But  perhaps  the  St.  Werburgh  piece  (E.E.T.S.)  at  least  ought  to 
have  been  mentioned.  It  is  not  very  specially  noteworthy  for  irregular 
length  of  line,  though  the  writer  evidently  does  not  trouble  himself 
in  the  least  about  this.  But  it  is  almost  the  ne  plus  ultra  of  sheer 
prose  cut  into  not  very  regular  lengths,  perfunctorily  tipped  with 
rhyme,  and  turned  loose.  Such  books  help  us,  more  than  anything 
else,  to  understand  the  at  first  sight  unreasonable  aversion  of  some  in 
the  next  generation  or  two  to  rhyme  itself. 

Page  266. — It  might  not  have  been  ill  to  mention  the  comparative 
prosodic  correctness  of  the  English  poems  ascribed  to  Charles 
d'Orldans,  in  support  of  the  contention  advanced  in  this  context. 

Page  335. — If  I  had  written  this  chapter  a  little  later  I  should  have 


xvi         ADDENDA  AND  CORRIGENDA  FOR  VOL.  I. 

given  a  special  notice  to  the  rhymed  doggerel  oiRespublica  (E.E.T.S.), 
which  has  some  peculiarities. 

Page  371. — "Inarticulatenesses  like  the  final  e."  1  intend  no 
disrespect  to  this  syllable  or  vocable  in  any  other  language  ;  especially 
none  to  it  in  German,  where  it  often  gives  occasion  for  the  most 
exquisite  melody.  But  we  seem  to  have  lost,  if  indeed  we  ever  had, 
the  proper  pronunciation  of  it ;  and  we  want  broader  vowel-sound 
than  we  usually  have  to  bring  out  by  contrast  that  pronunciation, 
little  more  than  a  breath  as  it  should  be.  (Compare  the  final  line 
of  Baroness  Marie  von  Ebner  -  Eschenbach's  delightful  poemlet 
Ein  kleines  Lied- — 

Und  cine  game  Seek. ) 

We  can  still  get  something  of  the  kind  with  the  participle  -td  and  a 
strong  vowel  sound  behind  it;  but  the  'y  sound  in  "pretty,"  "pony," 
etc.,  is  very  unmanageable,  and  we  have  hardly  any  other  for  valued 
final  e  alone  in  English. 


ADDENDUM 

I  HAVE  observed,  since  this  book  was  printed  off,  another  case  of 
"between  two  stools"  (cf.  note  p.  5).  Cleveland's  curious  "Mark 
Antony  "  should  have  been  noticed,  as  having  been  printed  at  least 
by  1647,  either  with  "  Phyllida  Flouts  Me,"  p.  3.36,  or  with 
Dryden's  still  more  similar  though  much  improved  hybrids,  p.  373. 
But  discussion  of  it  will  in  any  case  come  best  in  one  of  the  postponed 
appendices. 


BOOK  V 

THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


VOL.  II 


CHAPTER    I 

SHAKESPEARE    AND    BLANK    VERSE 

Retrospect  of  Chaucer,  Surrey,  etc. — The  line  of  the  University  Wits 
— Shakespeare — The  order  to  be  taken  with  his  work — Titus 
Andronicus—The  Comedy  of  Errors — Love's  Labour's  Lost — 
The  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona — Romeo  and  Juliet — A  Mid- 
summer Nighfs  Dream — All's  Well  that  Ends  Well — The 
Early  Histories  and  their  Doubles — King  John — The  "Doubles" 
generally — Henry  VI. — Richard  HI. — Henry  IV. — Richard  II. 
— The  Merchant  of  Venice  —  The  later  plays — The  Tempest 

— The  later  (?)  Comedies — TJie  Merry  Wives — Measure  for 
Measure — As  You  Like  It — Taming  of  the  Shrew — Twelfth 
Night— Much  Ado — The  Winter's  Tale — The  other  English 
Histories — Henry  V. — Henry  VIII. — Troilus  and  Cressida — 
Timon  of  Athens — Coriolanus — Julius  Ccesar — Antony  and 
Cleopatra — The  Four  Great  Tragedies — Macbeth  —  Hamlet — 
King  Lear  —  Othello  —  Cymbeline  —  Pericles  —  General  con- 
siderations— The  pause — The  trisyllabic  foot  and  its  revival 

—The  redundant  syllable  —  Enjambment — The  morphology 
and  biology  of  blank  verse — The  Poems — Venus  and  Adonis — 
Lucrece — The  Sonnets — Miscellaneous  metres,  the  octosyllable 
— Decasyllabic  couplets — The  Songs — Note  on  The  Passionate 
Pilgrim,  etc. 

IT  is  perhaps  desirable,  though  some  pains  were  taken  to 
make  the  point  clear  long  before  the  close  of  the  last 
volume,1  to  repeat  that  the  attention  paid  to  Spenser,  and 
the  praise  bestowed  on  him,  involve  no  disregard,  and  still 
less  any  dispraise,  of  his  fellow-workers  in  prosody  and 
poetry  during  the  last  quarter  of  the  sixteenth  century. 
That  he  was  a  great  master  in  both  senses — that  he  gave 
actual,  direct,  almost  pedagogic  instruction  to  many  of  these 

1  E-g.  PP-  330,  333- 
3 


4  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

contemporaries — there  can  be  no  doubt  whatever.  But 
that  they  would  have  achieved,  perhaps  more  slowly  and 
uncertainly,  something  of  the  same  result  without  him, 
there  can  be  as  little.  Some  of  them,  we  know,  worked 
in  common  with  him  ;  others  may  very  well  have  worked 
independently.  All  shared,  in  their  several  degrees,  the 
new  afflatus  of  which  he  had  the  greatest  share  next 
to  Shakespeare's.  That  great  exception,  moreover,  and 
others,  worked  in  a  direction  which  he  did  not  even  try 
— putting  the  "  sports  "  of  the  first  Visions l  aside.  With 
these,  and  with  their  master  and  king,  we  shall  therefore 
now  deal.  And  we  shall  first  deal — reverting  in  Spenser's 
own  fashion  to  some  personages  of  the  last  volume  so  as 
to  knit  and  to  exhibit  the  continuity  and  vitality  of  the 
story — with  that  almost  greatest  and  certainly  most 
idiosyncratic  development  of  English  poetry,  the  un- 
rhymed  decasyllabic  or  blank  verse.  Under  this  we  shall 
consider  Shakespeare,  and  those  about  Shakespeare,  who 
practised  it.  But  as  with  Chaucer  and  Spenser  in  the 
past,  as  with  all  the  greatest  in  the  future,  we  shall  not 
allow  a  mere  hidebound  distinction  of  kind  to  prevent  us 
from  surveying  all  the  prosodic  work  of  Shakespeare 
himself  in  this  chapter.  For  this  also  will  throw  out 
tentacles  of  connection  with  what  is  to  come,  as  well  as 
with  what  is  past,  and  thus  again  serve  to  maintain  in 
evidence  the  vitality  and  the  continuity  of  the  subject. 
Retrospect  of  Blank  verse,  to  throw  back  a  little,  had,  as  has  been 
noticed,  made  its  appearance  in  a  rather  puzzling  fashion 
in  Chaucer's  prose  Tale  of  Melibee.  It  might,  no  doubt, 
be  possible  to  find  scattered  decasyllabics  in  other  early 
prose,  for  the  iambic  is  a  natural,  if  not  the  natural  rhythm 
of  modern  English  ;  but  I  do  not  remember  so  many 
together.2  It  is  at  least  no  unreasonable  supposition  that 
Chaucer,  with  his  head  full  of  the  decasyllabic  mould,  even 
though  he  had  made  up  his  mind  not  to  rhyme — i.e.  not 

1  Vol.  i.  pp.  351,  359,  360. 

2  There  is,  of  course,  the  famous — 

And  many  a  song,  and  many  a  lecherous  lay 
in  the  Palinode  to  the  Canterbury  Tales,  and  others. 


GHAP.  i         SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  5 

to  give  the  characteristic  of  verse  as  he  thought  it — 
should  slip  into  verse-rhythm  unintentionally,  and  perhaps 
without  even  observing  it.  But  the  conditions,  precedent  and 
surrounding,  of  this  phenomenon  are  too  absolutely  obscure 
to  make  it  much  worth  while  to  discuss  it  further.  We 
have  likewise  spoken  of  Surrey's  first  regular  attempts  at 
the  form,  and  have  noted  that,  naturally  and  almost  un- 
avoidably, there  is  a  tendency  in  them  to  make  line  and 
clause  coincide,  and  (as  naturally  if  not  quite  so  inevitably) 
no  great  advance  towards  the  discovery  of  the  secret  of 
pause-variation.1  The  same  remark  applied  to  the  earliest 
blank-verse  plays,  Gorboduc,  the  Misfortunes,  etc.  And 
we  saw  that  even  the  Marlowe-and-Peele  or  Peele-and- 
Marlowe  group,  great  as  was  the  advance  which  they 
made,  never  quite  achieved  that  combination  of  internal 
dissimilarityand  external  communication  which  is  necessary 
for  the  triumph  of  the  vehicle.  But  we  promised  some 
more  remarks  upon  this  subject,  and  the  time  has  now 
come  to  give  them. 

It  is  probably  not  superfluous,  at  the  beginning  of  a 
new  volume,  thus  to  pick  up  again  the  points  which  were 
lightly  touched  upon  in  this  respect  in  the  last  :  especially 

1  A  reviewer  reproached  me,  not  without  some  reason,  for  neglecting 
specially  to  notice  Gascoigne's  blank  verse  in  77ie  Steel  Glass.  It  was  the 
usual  case  of  hesitation  exactly  where  to  place  the  notice,  ending  in  its  being 
placed  nowhere.  The  sample  is  chiefly  interesting  as  one  of  its  author's 
numerous  tentatives  in  nearly  or  wholly  new  style.  It  has  no  very  special 
characteristics,  but  shares  with  all  its  early  kin  those  of  strongly  single-moulded 
lines,  abundant  epanaphora,  etc.  But  a  specimen  should  be  given  : — 

And  on  their  backs  they  bear  both  land  and  fee, 
Castles  and  towers,  revenues  and  receipts, 
Lordships  and  manors,  fines, — yea  farms — and  all. 
"What  should  these  be?"  (speak  you,  my  lovely  lord?) 
They  be  not  men  :  for  why,  they  have  no  beards. 
They  be  no  boys,  which  wear  such  sidelong  gowns. 
They  be  no  gods,  for  all  their  gallant  gloss. 
They  be  no  devils,  I  trow,  which  seem  so  saintish. 
What  be  they  ?  women  ?  masking  in  men's  weeds 
With  dutchkin  doublets  and  with  jerkins  jagged  ? 
With  Spanish  spangs,  and  ruffs  set  out  of  France, 
With  high  copt  hats  and  feathers  flaunt-a-flaunt  ? 
They  be,  so  sure,  even  -woe  to  men  indeed. 

There  are  one  or  two  other  instances  of  non-dramatic  blanks  within  the 
sixteenth  century,  but  they  are  quite  unimportant. 


THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


that  of  the  main  one — the  excessively  integral  character 
of  the  line  in  these  poets.  The  consecrated  term  of  "end- 
stopped"  is  open  to  the  objection  that  it  may  easily 
convey  a  wrong  idea — that  of  end-punctuated ;  and  that 
even  if  this  is  escaped,  the  mere  stoppage  of  the  line  at  the 
The  line  of  end  is  not  the  whole  of  the  matter.  It  is  true  that  a  very 
^University  large — an  enormous — proportion  of  their  lines  have  (or 
ought  to  have)  stops  at  the  end  ;  but  it  is  also  true  that 
many  which  have  not,  even  in  modern  editions,  and 
perhaps  ought  not  to  have,  on  any  reasonable  theory  of 
punctuation,  are  still  e.n&-lopped  if  not  -stopped.  Here  are 
three  examples,  selected,  according  to  our  favourite  principle, 
almost  at  haphazard,  certainly  not  on  any  principle  of 
"  packing  the  jury  " — 

And  tempted  more  than  ever  creature  was 
With  wealth,  with  beauty,  and  with  chivalry. 

PEELE,  Arraignment  of  Paris. 

The  framing  of  this  circle  on  the  ground 

Brings  whirlwinds,  tempests,  thunder  and  light[e]ning. 

MARLOWE,  Doctor  Faustus. 

That  God  sends  down  his  hateful  wrath  for  sin 
On  such  as  never  heard  his  prophets  speak. 

LODGE  and  GREENE  (?) 
Looking-Glass  for  London  and  England. 

Now  in  none  of  these  distichs,  save,  perhaps,  the  first, 
could  a  comma  properly  be  placed  at  the  end  of  the  first 
line ;  yet  in  each  there  is  a  certain  completeness  of  clause 
which  shuts  the  sense  in.  Moreover,  these  plays  exhibit 
something  else,  not  quite  so  glaringly  evident,  which  will 
emerge  to  the  attentive  reader  if  he  brings  his  mind's  ear 
to  the  reading,  and  still  more  if  he  reads  aloud.  The 
lines  are  not  merely  stopped  at  the  end,  but  they  are 
constructed  to  stop  at  the  end.  They  are  moulded  indi- 
vidually, not  collectively.  Even  in  those  very  greatest 
passages  cited  formerly * — the  locus  classicus  on  poetry  in 
Tamburlaine,  the  death  -  agony  of  Faustus,  the  great 

i  Vol.  i.  pp.  347,  348. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE 


speech  of  Bathsheba,  and  the  rest — they  are  literally  "  some 
dozen  or  sixteen  lines  "  (is  it  one  of  the  "  points  in  Hamlet's 
soul "  that  he  meant  this  ?),  making,  it  is  true,  a  whole  of 
beauty,  but  separable  into  line-parts  as  Shakespeare's  own 
greatest  things  are  not.  The  effect  is  cumulative  ;  the 
poet  adds  line  after  line  to  produce  it,  as  you  hitch  the 
grooved  weight-disks  on  a  steel-yard.  It  is  a  dropping 
fire  not  a  volley,  a  shower  not  a  cascade.  So  inherent 
and  ingrained  is  this  characteristic  that  it  survives  and 
neutralises  the  most  audacious  enjambment *  in  grammar, 
which  does  sometimes  occur  in  these  poets.  As  for 
instance  in  the  Jew  of  Malta — 

Three  thousand  camels,  and  two  hundred  yoke 
Of  labouring  oxen,  and  five  hund[e]red 
She-asses — 

where,  do  what  you  will,  you  cannot  run  the  "  five  hundred 
she-asses  "  rhythmically  together. 

There  can  be  very  little  question  that  this  peculiarity, 
surviving  and  resisting  even  the  immense  poetical  advance 
which  these  poets  made,  is  a  great  disadvantage.  It  is 
least  felt  in  the  Faustus  speech,  because  that  supreme  agony 
consists  with — almost  invites — separated  and  ejaculatory 
expression.  The  Bathsheba  passage  is  mainly  descrip- 
tion ;  and  description  is  of  its  essence  cumulative  :  while 
the  miraculous  utterance  of  Tamburlaine  is,  as  it  were, 
a  succession  of  half-gasping  attempts  to  express  that  in- 
expressible of  which  it  speaks.  But  turn  to  the  only  less 
fine 

Leicester,  if  gentle  words  would  comfort  me 

of  Edward  the  Second.  It  also  is  wonderful  ;  but  how 
one  longs  for  one  minute  of  Shakespeare  to  turn  it  from 
a  string  of  dazzling  beads  to  a  ringed  and  winged  serpent 
of  colour  and  fire  !  Almost  every  line  has  an  actual  stop 
at  the  end,  and  those  which  have  not — for  instance 

And  so  it  fares  with  me,  whose  dauntless  mind 
The  ambitious  Mortimer  would  seek  to  curb— 

1  This  word  has  to  be  used  so  often  that  I  shall  henceforward  take  the 
liberty  of  Anglicising  it  invariably. 


8  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

are  too  stiffly  and  rigidly  constructed  towards  the  close  to 
run  on  as  they  should.  And  if  this  is  the  case  in  the 
greatest  passages  of  all,  what  must  it  be,  what  is  it,  in 
the  less  great  ?  A  perpetual  hobble,  as  it  were,  in  the 
pace ;  an  ever -officious  obstacle  and  blocking  in  the 
wind  -  stroke  or  the  oarage  of  poetry.  In  the  worst 
examples  of  all,  even  more  unpleasant  metaphors  suggest 
themselves  ;  the  verses  positively  hiccup  in  their  abrupt 
severance  of  rhythm  and  of  meaning.  Not  that  there  are 
not  glimpses  of  better  things.  After  the  above-quoted  great 
speech  of  Edward,  and  two  or  three  other  long  ones,  less 
good  in  the  same  style,  there  is  one  in  which  Marlowe 
nearly  shakes  himself  free — 

Oh  !  would  I  might !  but  heaven  and  earth  conspire 
To  make  me  miserable. 

He  of  you  all  that  most  desires  my  blood, 
And  will  be  called  the  murderer  of  a  king, 
Take  it. 

And  Isabel,  whose  eyes,  being  turned  to  steel, 
Will  sooner  sparkle  fire  than  shed  a  tear. 

Yet  he  has  not  got  entirely  free  of  the  single-moulded 
line  even  here.  In  another  speech  (of  Isabel's  own)  he 
comes  even  nearer  ;  and  it  is  at  least  noteworthy  that  it 
draws  upon  her  the  rebuke  of  her  lover  Mortimer — 

Nay,  Madam,  if  you  be  a  warrior, 

You  must  not  grow  so  passionate  in  speeches. 

Yet  the  passion  had  been  able  to  fuse  the  ordinary 
stichomythia1  into  this — 

Our  kindest  friends  in  Belgia  have  we  left 

To  cope  with  friends  at  home  ;  a  heavy  case 

When  force  to  force  is  knit,  and  sword  and  glaive 

In  civil  broils  make  kin  and  countrymen 

Slaughter  themselves  in  others,  and  their  sides 

With  their  own  weapons  gored  !     But  what's  the  help  ? 

Misgoverned  kings  are  cause  of  all  this  wreck  ; 

1  The  word  is,  of  course,  ordinarily  and  properly  used  of  conversation  in 
alternate  single  lines.  But  I  employ  it  here  because  this  conversation 
necessarily  generates  a  line  of  the  type  I  am  discussing. 


CHAP,  i         SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  9 

And,  Edward,  thou  art  one  among  them  all, 
Whose  looseness  hath  betrayed  thy  land  to  spoil, 
Who  made  the  channel  overflow  with  blood 
Of  thine  own  people. 

It  is  to  be  feared  that  Mortimer  had  no  ears  for  "  a  good 
metre  and  a  plentiful  vein,"  even  from  fair  and,  to  him, 
loving  lips.  Earlier,  in  the  Herald's  speech  to  Edward, 
oratory  does  the  task  of  passion  to  some  extent,  as  in 

That  from  your  princely  person  you  remove 
This  Spenser,  as  a  putrefying  branch 
That  deads  the  royal  vine. 

And  of  course  there  would  be  no  difficulty  in  producing 
other  instances,  both  from  Marlowe  himself  and  from  the 
rest  of  the  group,  as  in  the  speech  of  Jonas  in  A  Looking- 
Glass  for  London  and  England — 

Lo  !   Israel  once  that  flourished  like  the  vine 
Is  barren  laid  :  the  beautiful  increase 
Is  wholly  blent,  and  irreligious  zeal 
Encampeth  there  where  virtue  was  enthroned  ; 

or  in  that  of  Paris  in  The  Arraignment — 

Sacred  and  just,  thou  great  and  dreadful  Jove, 

And  you,  thrice-reverend  powers,  whom  love  nor  hate 

May  wrest  awry  ;  if  this  to  me  a  man, 

This  fortune,  fatal  be,  that  I  must  plead,  etc. 

But,  as  a  rule,  this  sort  of  welding  of  the  lines  together, 
and  the  tempering  and  annealing  of  the  line  itself  that 
makes  it  possible,  are  neglected.  They  do  not  seem  to 
have  come  within  the  scope  and  purview  of  the  writer. 
Even  when,  as  not  so  very  frequently  happens,  there  is  a 
full  or  at  any  rate  heavy  stop  in  the  middle  or  towards 
the  two  ends,  it  is  not  utilised  for  the  purpose  ;  the  old 
anhelitus  or  gasp  at  the  end  of  the  line,  occasioned  by 
the  omission  to  take  minor  inhalation  during  its  course, 
seems  to  beset  the  poet.  And,  misty  as  all  the  chrono- 
logy of  the  theatre  of  the  period  is,  we  do  know  that 
when  Shakespeare  came  to  town,  and  heard  or  read  the 
work  of  these  men,  this  kind  of  blank-verse  rhythm  must 
have  been  what  he  read  or  heard. 


THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


BOOK   V 


Shakespeare.  He  did  not  alter  it  at  once  ;  even  he  could  not  have 
altered  it  at  once  without  a  miracle,  and  an  unwholesome 
sort  of  miracle  too.  There  was  no  reason  why  the 
ordinary  laws  of  growth,  which  our  prosody  so  admirably 
exemplifies,  should  be  altered  in  his  case  ;  and  had  they 
been  so,  even  his  versification  could  hardly  have  displayed 
that  perfect  naturalness  and  infinite  variety  which  it 
actually  possesses,  but  would  have  shown  only  a  hard  and 
machine-like  consummateness — within  limits — after  the 
Racinian  or  Popian  manner.  Like  Chaucer,  like  Spenser, 
Shakespeare,  beyond  all  reasonable  doubt,  experimented  ; 
and  though  we  shall  not  here  attempt  to  fix  the  order  of  the 
experiments  with  the  rashness  which  some  have  shown, 
every  canon  of  criticism,  external  and  internal  alike,  when 
reasonably  applied,  gives  us  sufficient  data.  Taking  the 
Meres  list  as  the  positive  and  not  reasonably  disputable 
terminus  ad  quern  externally  given,  and  applying  to  it 
h  (w^tn  "  exception  for  errors  ")  the  internal  signs  of  less  or 

his  work.  more  maturity  in  handling  diction  and  metre  alike,  we 
may  rank  Titus  Andronicus,  the  Comedy  of  Errors,  and 
Love's  Labour's  Lost  as  the  earliest ;  the  Two  Gentlemen 
of  Verona,  Romeo  and  Juliet,  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream, 
and  All's  Well  that  Ends  Well  (if  it  is  Love's  Labour's 
Found]  next ;  the  historical  plays  mentioned  by  Meres 
with  the  addition  (in  any  degree  of  "  doubtfulness  "  that 
the  reader  may  please)  of  Henry  VI,  overlapping  this 
second  batch  in  no  very  certain  order  ;  and  The  Merchant 
of  Venice,  in  part  at  least,  last.  But  I  ought  to  say  that 
it  seems  to  me  pretty  certain  that  some  (and  perhaps 
many)  of  the  plays  represent  very  different  stages,  and 
were  in  all  probability  begun,  suspended,  and  finished 
with  more  or  less  rewriting,  sometimes  at  long  intervals.1 

1  In  making  the  above  order  (which  Heaven  forefend  that  I  should  propose 
as  "  matter  of  breviary  "  !)  I  have  been  guided,  as  is  surely  here  not  improper, 
mainly  by  the  plain  evidences  of  prosodic  improvement.  As  for  7"ttus 
Andronicus,  the  statement  of  Meres  is  sufficient  evidence  to  me  that 
Shakespeare  did  write  on  the  subject :  and  I  have  myself  read  Shakespeare 
(ever  since  I  could  read  anything)  to  no  purpose  if  there  is  anything  in  the 
play  we  have  that  Shakespeare  might  not  have  written,  though  I  do  not  say 
that  it  is  all  his.  As  for  Henry  VI.,  the  fantastic  attempts  that  used  to  be 
made,  twenty  or  thirty  years  ago,  to  parcel  it  out  among  the  "  Wits,"  have 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  ir 

If  Shakespeare  did  not  write  the  Titus  Andronicus  Titus 
that  we  have,  there  was  another  person  living  at  that A 
time  who  had  a  Shakespearian  genius,  who  was  passing 
through  exactly  the  stage  that  Shakespeare  must  have 
passed  through,  and  who  is  afterwards  lost  sight  of.  For 
the  many  beauties  which  chequer  its  prodigality  of  horrors 
are  of  a  distinctly  different  type  from  the  Marlowesque, 
are  above  anything  in  Kyd  and  the  others  at  this  time, 
and  are  still  more  markedly  different  from  anything  in 
Middleton,  Webster,  and  the  rest  of  the  younger  genera- 
tion. But  whether  Shakespeare  wrote  it  or  not,  it  is  of  / 
equal  value  to  us  as  prosodic  stuff  and  stage.  For  it  is 
almost  certainly  the  work  of  a  man  who,  either  going 
through  the  same  process  as  the  Marlowe  group  or 
studying  their  work  directly,  is  in  the  main  and  con- 
sciously working  with  the  same  single-verse  mould  that 
they  worked  with.  The  First  Act  contains  all  but  five 
hundred  lines  ;  and  though  they  are  not  invariably 
stopped — that  is,  punctuated — at  the  end,  I  have,  in 
reading  them  over  again  carefully,  detected  hardly  one 
that  is  not  of  this  mould — that  does  not  invite  the 
suspension  of  voice  or  of  eye  at  the  close  of  the  line. 
And  this  prevails  throughout  the  play,  even  in  those 
numerous  fine  passages  (to  my  thinking,  quite  clearly 
Shakespearian  in  themselves)  which  lighten  its  darkness. 
The  soliloquy  of  Aaron  opening  Act  II.  ;  the  charming 
one  of  Titus  at  the  beginning  of  the  next  scene,  and  that 
of  Tamora  in  the  third  ;  even  the  famous  and  splendid 
lines  of  Martius — 

Upon  his  bloody  finger  he  doth  wear ; 

the  pathetic,  if  conceited,  lamentations  of  nr:*:rr  and 
Marcus  over  Lavinia  ;  and  the  brave  rhetorical  addresses 
of  Marcus  and  Lucius  at  the  end, — all  bear  this  impression, 
indelibly  and  unmistakably  stamped  on  them. 

But  the  man  who  wrote  them,  be  he.  let  it  be  once 

had  their  day.  Most  of  the  three  parts  represent,  of  course,  rehandling  of 
older  work  ;  but  again  I  see  no  reason  to  question  the  fact  of  Shakespeare 
having  been  the  rehandler.  That  many  things,  especially  the  part  of  Margaret 
as  we  have  it,  are  his,  I  dare  swear. 


12  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

more  repeated,  Shakespeare  or  another,  is  a  man  of  genius, 
if  yet  only  in  his  nonage,  and  he  represents  and  has  the 
advantages  of  a  stage  farther  than  Marlowe  himself  could 
traverse.  Even  more  distinctly,  therefore,  than  in  Marlowe 
himself  does  passion  (according  to  the  lover  of  Isabel) 
or  something  else  run  the  moulds  of  his  verse  together. 
It  may  be  fanciful  to  think  that  he  made  some  re- 
sistance to  this  agency  ;  but  this  is  just  what  a  conscien- 
tious student  of  style  does  do.  At  any  rate,  there 
are  passages  where  the  fusion  has  taken  place,  and  we 
may  take  two  of  them — one  from  the  threnos  above 
mentioned  (there  are  others  there),  and  the  other  the 
well-known  proclamation  of  unbelief  by  Aaron.  The 
first  shows  most  interestingly  how  actual  punctuation 
at  the  end  of  lines  by  no  means  prevents  the  continuity, 
if  the  rises  and  falls,  the  weightings  and  lightenings,  within 
the  line  are  observed  : — 

Come,  let's  fall  to  ;  and,  gentle  girl,  eat  this : 

Here  is  no  drink  !     Hark,  Marcus,  what  she  says  ; 

I  can  interpret  all  her  martyred  signs  ; 

She  says  she  drinks  no  other  drink  but  tears, 

Brewed  with  her  sorrow,  meshed  upon  her  cheeks. 

Speechless  complainer,  I  will  learn  thy  thought ; 

In  thy  dumb  action  will  I  be  as  perfect 

As  begging  hermits  in  their  holy  prayers  : 

Thou  shalt  not  sigh,  nor  hold  thy  stumps  to  heaven, 

Nor  wink,  nor  nod,  nor  kneel,  nor  make  a  sign, 

But  I  of  these  will  wrest  an  alphabet, 

And,  by  still  practice,  learn  to  know  thy  meaning. 

Here  is  the  beginning  of  the  verse- paragraph  ;  and  here, 
again,  is  a  still  better  example  helped  by  the  use — so 
rare  in  Marlowe  and  the  others — of  the  hendecasyllable  : — 

What  if  I  do  not  ?  as,  indeed,  I  do  not ; 

Yet,  for  I  know  thou  art  religious, 

And  hast  a  thing  within  thee,  called  conscience, 

With  twenty  popish  tricks  and  ceremonies, 

Which  I  have  seen  thee  careful  to  observe, 

Therefore  I  urge  thy  oath  ;  for  that  I  know 

An  idiot  holds  his  bauble  for  a  god, 

And  keeps  the  oath  which  by  that  god  he  swears. 

If  anybody  says  that  this  last  is  so  prosodically  accom- 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  13 

plished  that  it  must  be  a  later  insertion,  I  shall  not 
quarrel  with  him  much  ;  for  he  will  certainly  not  damage 
my  argument,  but  confirm  it.  It  is  certain  that  the 
verse  of  the  play,  as  a  whole,  is  "  single-moulded "  in 
the  sense  in  which  we  are  using  that  word.  The  writer 
does  not  yet  think  of  his  quantities  and  pauses  as  keys, 
by  dwelling  on  which,  or  not  dwelling  on  them,  he  can 
make  connection  or  break  it  with  the  next  line,  and 
the  next,  and  the  whole  symphonic  unit.  But  it  is 
equally  certain  that  there  are  instances  where  something 
of  the  sort  seems  to  be  glimmering  upon  him. 

The  Comedy  of  Errors  and  Love's  Labour's  Lost, 
especially  the  latter,  supply  matter  of  prosodic  interest 
strikingly  different  at  first  sight  from  that  of  Titus 
A ndronicus ;  and  much  more  varied,  but  by  no  means 
inconsistent.  In  Titus  we  have  a  man  who  is  setting 
himself — setting  his  teeth,  one  may  almost  say — to  the 
task  of  carrying  out  a  definite  model  and  pattern  in  his 
verse,  and  who  succeeds — almost,  if  not  quite,  too  well. 
In  the  others  we  have  quite  conceivably  the  same  man 
(if  that  man  was  Shakespeare)  indulging  in  almost  un- 
limited experiment,  constantly  breaking  out  of  blank 
verse  altogether,  or,  if  anybody  prefers  it,  only  occasionally 
settling  down  thereinto.  It  is,  however,  extremely  note- 
worthy— indeed,  of  the  first  importance — that  the  staple 
in  blank  verse  is  still  the  single-moulded  line,  the  line 
intended  to  be  used  cumulatively,  and  not  periodically. 
That  the  variety  and  licence  of  both,  as  compared  with 
Titus,  are  at  least  partly  to  be  accounted  for  by  the  fact 
that  both  are  comedies — that  they  take  the  licence  which 
not  merely  immemorial  tradition,  but  the  nature  of  things, 
confers  on  that  form  in  comparison  with  tragedy — is  proper 
to  be  mentioned,  but  can  require  no  insistence. 

Of  the  two,  that  which  actually  tickets  itself  as  Comedy  The  Comedy 
is  the  less  interesting  prosodically,  as  in  other  ways  ;    but  °f Errors- 
its  want  of  interest  is  only  comparative,  not  positive  at 
all.      That    much   of  it  is  in  prose ;    that   much    again,1 

1  I  have  always  felt  pretty  sure  that  we  have  here  some  of  Shakespeare's 
very  earliest  work. 


14  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

whether  in  prose  or  in  some  sort  of  verse,  is  devoted  to 
that  stichomytkic  bandying  of  speech,  generally  with  in- 
ordinate word-play,  which  is  the  most  difficult — perhaps 
to  good  digestions  the  only  difficult — thing  in  Shakespeare 
to  stomach  ;  these  things  are  obvious  to  the  mere  turner 
of  the  pages.  But  the  piece  opens  with  a  long  spell  of 
blank  verse,  and  it  is  diversified  throughout,  not  only 
with  these  long  blank-verse  set-speeches,  which  the  Senecan 
tradition  fostered,  but  with  blank  verse  dialogue  of  all 
sizes.  The  staple  is  still  single-moulded,  of  the  kind  just 
analysed,  which  often  coincides  with  but  does  not 
necessitate  end -punctuation,  while  end -punctuation  by 
no  means  necessitates  it.  The  opening  speeches  of  the 
Duke  and  Aegeon  are  almost  wholly  of  this  pattern,1  as 
are  many  of  those  of  Adriana  and  Luciana.  Yet  the 
fine  tirade  of  the  wronged  wife  (as  she  thinks  herself)  to 
him  she  thinks  her  husband — 

Ay  !  ay  !  Antipholus,  look  strange  and  frown — 

shows  once  more  the  fusing  power  of  passion,  especially 
in  the  extremely  beautiful  lines  : — 

For  know,  my  love,  as  easy  may'st  thou  fall 

A  drop  of  water  in  the  breaking  gulf, 

And  take  unmingled  thence  that  drop  again, 

Without  addition  or  diminishing, 

As  take  from  me  thyself,  and  not  me  too, 

where  the  secrets  of  prosodic  effect  are  the  inset  "  my 
love  "  ;  the  pauseless  rapidity  of  the  next  line,  or  even  two 
lines ;  the  stop,  given  by  emotion,  not  grammar,  at 
"  thyself,"  and  the  spondee  (making  with  the  "  not "  of 
the  preceding  foot  almost  a  molossus)  of  the  close. 

But  besides  the  prose  and  the  blank  verse  we  find, 
in  the  Comedy  of  Errors,  what  we  did  not  find  in  Titus — 
an  admixture  of  other  metres  ;  while  in  the  blank  verse 
itself  we  find  frequent  epanaphora — that  favourite  Eliza- 
bethan device  (prosodic  quite  as  much  as  rhetorical) 
which  has  been  referred  to  in  the  last  volume,  and  which 
is  particularly  notable  in  the  great  speech  of  Adriana 

1  We  shall  see  that  it  persists  in  overture  perhaps  longer  than  anywhere  else. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  15 

quoted  above.  The  additional  metres,  besides  the  couplet 
(constantly,  according  to  custom,  at  the  end  of  speech 
and  scene,  and  not  seldom  elsewhere),  include  rhymed 
doggerel  of  various  lengths  like  that  in  the  early  plays — 

O  villain  !  thou  hast  stolen  both  my  office  and  my  name, 
The  one  ne'er  got  me  credit,  the  other  mickle  blame  : 
If  thou  hadst  been  Dromio  to-day  in  my  place, 
Thou  wouldst  have  changed  thy  face  for  a  name  or  thy  name 
for  an  ass, 

and  alternate-rhymed  quatrains  l — 

And  may  it  be  that  you  have  quite  forgot 
A  husband's  office  ?     Shall,  Antipholus, 
Even  in  the  spring  of  love,  thy  love-springs  rot  ? 
Shall  love,  in  building,  grow  so  ruinous  ? 


1  The  locus  classicus  for  the  change  of  taste  in  this  dramatic  metre  is,  of 
course,  the  Tancred  and  Gismutid  of  Robert  Wilmot,  which,  written  in 
quatrains  about  1568,  was  published  twenty-four  years  later  (1591)  in  blank 
verse  (with  many  couplets,  and  even  some  quatrains,  still  floating  about  in  it), 
"  fresh  painted,"  as  the  author  says  in  his  Dedication  to  the  Inner  Temple. 
The  play,  in  its  later  form,  with  some  extracts  from  the  MSS.  of  the  earlier, 
will  be  found  in  the  seventh  volume  of  Hazlitt's  Dodsley.  Two  short  parallel 
passages  may  be  given  : — 

Tancred.     O  dolorous  hap,  ruthful  and  all  of  woe, 

Alas  !  I  careful  wretch,  what  resteth  me  ? 
Shall  I  now  live,  that  with  these  eyes  did  so 

Behold  my  daughter  die  ?  what  ?  shall  I  see 
Her  death  before  my  face  that  was  my  life, 

And  I  to  live  that  was  her  life's  decay  ? 
Shall  not  this  hand  reach  to  this  heart  the  knife 

That  may  bereave  both  sight  and  life  away, 
And  in  the  shadows  dark  to  seek  her  ghost 
.  And  wander  there  with  her  ? 

This  becomes  later — 

Now,  ruthful,  wretched  king,  what  resteth  thee  ? 

Wilt  thou  now  live  wasted  with  misery  ? 

Wilt  thou  now  live  that  with  these  eyes  did  see 

Thy  daughter  dead  ?  wilt  thou  now  live  to  see 

Her  funerals  that  of  thy  life  was  stay  ? 

Wilt  thou  now  live  that  wast  her  life's  decay  ? 

Shall  not  this  hand  reach  to  this  heart  the  stroke  ? 

The  survival  of  rhyme  in  the  second  passage  is  curious  though  not  unnatural ; 
but  it  is  still  more  curious,  though  one  sees  the  reason  on  a  moment's  thought, 
that  the  quatrains  are  rather  better  blank  verse  than  the  blank  verse  itself, 
only  tagged.  The  rhyme  is  in  itself  superfluous,  but  it  has  encouraged  the 
writer  to  step  out  of  the  narrowest  line-model.  It  may  be  just  worth  adding 
that  Romeo  and  Juliet  is  dated  by  some  as  early  as  this  very  year  1591. 


16  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

continued  for  over  fifty  lines.  But  there  are  no  pure 
fourteeners,  though  the  doggerel  may  sometimes  simulate 
them. 

Lwe's  Labour's  These  last  the  other  play  supplies,  with  much  else  ; 
in  fact,  Love's  Labours  Lost,  so  prolific  in  many  ways  of 
disorderly  but  dear  delights,  is  unquestionably  the  "place" 
for  the  prosody  of  the  youthful  Shakespeare.  There  is  a 
great  deal  of  prose  ;  some  of  it  approaching  Shakespeare's 
best  in  phrase  and  quality,  if  full  of  p/che's  de  jeunesse  in 
diction  and  otherwise.  There  is  the  doggerel,  occurring 
chiefly  in  the  speeches  of  Costard  and  Nathaniel.  There 
are  here  undoubted  fourteeners  (or  fifteeners  with  the 
double  rhyme),  which  the  great  Holofernes  naturally 
prefers  l  to  doggerel  pure  and  simple.  There  are  stately 
Alexandrines,2  most  reviewerishly  criticised  by  the  said 
Holofernes,  but  doing  credit  to  the  abilities  of  Biron. 
There  are  the  couplets  and  the  quatrains,  solid  and  split 
into  conversation,  but  sometimes  of  extreme  beauty.3 
There  are  (what  we  have  not  had  in  either  of  the  other 
plays)  early  and  delicious  examples  of  the  lyrics  with 
which  we  shall  deal  as  a  whole  presently.  And  there 
is  the  blank  verse. 

This  last  is  so  much  scattered  among  the  other 
experiments  that  it  is  far  less  easy  to  judge  it  than  in 
Titus,  and  even  than  in  the  Comedy.  But  I  think  it  may 
be  said  without  rashness  that  the  single -mould  line,  the 
cumulative  and  non-periodic  line,  still  holds  the  field  on 
the  whole.  When  he  is  doing  things  deliberately,  the 
poet  seems  still  to  cling  to  it, — in  the  king's  opening 

1  He  also   "will  something   affect   the   letter   [alliterate]   for    it    argues 
facility,"  as  in 

rplay?-] 
L  praise  J 

The  preyful  princess  pierced  and  pricked  a  pretty  pleasing  pricket ; 
Some  say  a  sore  ;  but  not  a  sore,  till  now  made  sore  with  shooting. 

2  If  love  make  me  forsworn,  how  shall  I  swear  to  love  ? 

3  As  those  in   "  Who  sees  the  heavenly   Rosaline "  which    Milton  did 
not  miss — 

That  like  a  rude  and  savage  man  of  Inde 

At  the  first  opening  of  the  gorgeous  East, 
Bows  not  his  vassal  head  and  stricken  mind, 
Kisses  the  base  ground  with  obedient  breast. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  17 

harangue  especially  ;  in  his  formal  address  to  the  Princess 
about  business  ;  in  most  of  the  set  speeches.  But  once 
more  the  fire  kindles  ;  and  passion  or  satire,  love  or  wit, 
gets  the  better  of  his  intention,  or  makes  him  intend 
more  nobly.  It  is  in  the  speeches  of  Biron,  the  real 
hero,  and  of  Rosaline,  the  real  heroine,  that  this  happens 
most  frequently  and  with  most  felicity.  Biron  shakes 
himself  half-free  in  the  self-satire  on  his  love  at  the  end 
of  Act  III.,  and  is  only  prevented  from  doing  so  fully 
in  the  splendid  and  famous  "  Who  sees  the  heavenly 
Rosaline  "  (quoted  already  above)  by  the  fact  of  his  own 
conceit  in  choosing  the  quatrain.  But  in  the  long  speech 
which  gives  the  "  salve  for  perjury,"  the  "placebo  and 
dirige"  to  his  and  his  companions'  self-denying  ordinance 
(IV.  iii.  290-365),  the  battle  of  the  blank-verse  lines,  the 
"  breaking  deep "  (to  quote  Adriana  as  we  quoted 
Mortimer)  melting  the  icy  single  verses,  is  a  wonderful 
spectacle.  And  the  "  studies "  of  his  lady  at  the  close, 
with  his  own  interjected  remonstrance,  show  us  the  wave 
of  the  true  blank  verse  all  but  free, — rejoicing  in  its 
freedom  and  strengthened  in  its  strength.1 

1  For  when  would  you,  my  liege,  or  you,  or  you, 
In  leaden  contemplation  have  found  out 
Such  fiery  numbers  as  the  prompting  eyes 
Of  beauty's  tutors  have  enrich'd  you  with  ? 
Other  slow  arts  entirely  keep  the  brain  ; 
And  therefore,  finding  barren  practisers, 
Scarce  show  a  harvest  of  their  heavy  toil : 
But  love,  first  learned  in  a  lady's  eyes, 
Lives  not  alone  immured  in  the  brain  ; 
But,  with  the  motion  of  all  elements, 
Courses  as  swift  as  thought  in  every  power, 
And  gives  to  every  power  a  double  power, 
Above  their  functions  and  their  offices. 
It  adds  a  precious  seeing  to  the  eye  ; 
A  lover's  eyes  will  gaze  an  eagle  blind  ; 
A  lover's  ear  will  hear  the  lowest  sound, 
When  the  suspicious  head  of  theft  is  stopp'd  : 
Love's  feeling  is  more  soft  and  sensible 
Than  are  the  tender  horns  of  cockled  snails  ; 
Love's  tongue  proves  dainty  Bacchus  gross  in  taste  : 
For  valour,  is  not  Love  a  Hercules, 
Still  climbing  trees  in  the  Hesperides  ? 
Subtle  as  Sphinx  ;  as  sweet  and  musical 
As  bright  Apollo's  lute,  strung  with  his  hair  ; 
VOL.  II  C 


i8  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

The  TWO  The  other  comedy,  which  comes  next  to  these  two  in 

^  nardly  disputable  prosodic  signs  of  belonging  to  an  early 
if  not  the  very  earliest  stage  —  TJie  Two  Gentlemen  of 
Verona, — is  perhaps  not  to  be  widely  separated  from  them, 
except  by  too  curious  consideration.  Yet  there  are  real 
differentiae.  We  find  excursions  into  doggerel — 

From  a  pound  to  a  pin,  fold  it  over  and  over, 

'Tis  threefold  too  little  for  carrying  a  letter  to  your  lover  ; 

and  into  pure  fourteeners — 

For  often  have  you  writ  to  her  and  she  in  modesty, 
Or  else  for  want  of  idle  time,  could  not  again  reply, 


And  when  Love  speaks,  the  voice  of  all  the  gods 
Make  heaven  drowsy  with  the  harmony. 

Biron.  Studies  ray  lady  ?  mistress,  look  on  me  ; 
Behold  the  window  of  my  heart,  mine  eye, 
What  humble  suit  attends  thy  answer  there  : 
Impose  some  service  on  me  for  thy  love. 

Ros.   Oft  have  I  heard  of  you,  my  Lord  Biron, 
Before  I  saw  you  ;  and  the  world's  large  tongue 
Proclaims  you  for  a  man  replete  with  mocks, 
Full  of  comparisons  and  wounding  flouts, 
Which  you  on  all  estates  will  execute 
That  lie  within  the  mercy  of  your  wit. 
To  weed  this  wormwood  from  your  fruitful  brain, 
And  therewithal  to  win  me,  if  you  please, 
Without  the  which  I  am  not  to  be  won, 
You  shall  this  twelvemonth  term  from  day  to  day 
Visit  the  speechless  sick  and  still  converse 
With  groaning  wretches  ;  and  your  task  shall  be, 
With  all  the  fierce  endeavour  of  your  wit 
To  enforce  the  pained  impotent  to  smile. 

Biron.  To  move  wild  laughter  in  the  throat  of  death  ? 
It  cannot  be  ;  it  is  impossible  : 
Mirth  cannot  move  a  soul  in  agony. 

Ros.   Why,  that's  the  way  to  choke  a  gibing  spirit, 
Whose  influence  is  begot  of  that  loose  grace 
Which  shallow  laughing  hearers  give  to  fools  : 
A  jest's  prosperity  lies  in  the  ear 
Of  him  that  hears  it,  never  in  the  tongue 
Of  him  that  makes  it  :  then,  if  sickly  ears, 
Deaf'd  with  the  clamours  of  their  own  dear  groans, 
Will  hear  your  idle  scorns,  continue  then, 
And  I  will  have  you  and  that  fault  withal ; 
But  if  they  will  not,  throw  away  that  spirit, 
And  I  shall  find  you  empty  of  that  fault, 
Right  joyful  of  your  reformation. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  19 

as  well  as  stanzas,  etc.  But  they  are  nothing  like  so 
frequent  as  in  the  Errors  and  in  Love's  Labour's  Lost. 
The  blank  verse  itself,  too,  is  even  less  run-on  than  in 
either  of  the  others — stop  or  no  stop  at  the  end  of  the 
line,  each  is  formed  with  a  single  respiration.  Even 
Julia's  exquisite  lines — 

She  hath  been  fairer,  Madam,  than  she  is — 

which  supply  the  unmistakable  Shakespearian  sign-manual, 
and  (with  one  or  two  other  things)  have  given  the  play  a 
reputation  with  some  good  judges  that,  as  a  whole,  it 
hardly  deserves  — are  distinctly  of  this  type.  But  there  is 
in  these  blank-verse  passages  a  curious  feature  which  we 
sometimes  do  not  notice,  where  the  verse,  as  such,  is 
much  more  accomplished  :  and  that  is  the  presence  of  the 
redundant  syllable.  This  appears  in  the  first  line  of 
Julia's  first  soliloquy — 

And  yet  I  would  I  had  o'erlooked  the  letter, 

and  there  are  numerous  other  examples.  Yet  it  may  be 
doubted, — when  we  come  upon  such  a  curious  piece  of 
unfinishedness  as  the  quatrain — 

Oh,  how  this  spring  of  love  resembleth 

The  uncertain  glory  of  an  April  day, 
Which  now  shows  all  the  beauty  of  the  sun, 

And  by  and  by  a  cloud  takes  all  away ! 

with  its  omission  to  rhyme  the  first  and  third  lines,  and  its 
unskilful  repetition  of  "  all," — whether  in  the  other  case 
also  there  is  more  than  the  mere  carelessness  of  the  novice. 
LovJs  Labour  s  Lost,  to  return  to  it  for  a  moment,  is  in 
a  manner  Shakespeare's  SJiepJierd's  Kalendar  for  prosodic 
experiment.  But  there  were  more  reasons  than  one  why 
it  should  not  serve  him  once  for  all,  why  he  should  still 
"  box  the  compass "  of  verse.  In  the  first  place,  the 
play  is  a  less  serious  and  a  more  artificial  field  of  art- 
experiment  than  the  poem  ;  and  in  the  second,  though,  as 
we  know  on  good  authority,  Shakespeare  "  could  be  very 
serious,"  still  seriousness  was  not  quite  uppermost  with  him 
as  it  was  with  Spenser.  It  would  scarcely  be  erroneous 


20  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

to  say  that  he  never  outgrew  the  period  of  experiment—- 
at least  with  blank  verse  itself.  At  any  rate,  with  regard 
Romeo  and  to  these  early  plays,  each  is,  and  all  are,  full  of  it.  Romeo 
juhet.  anj  juiie^  for  instance,  renews  for  us  the  interest  of 
subject,  almost  of  kind,  in  its  relation  to  prosody.  It  is  a 
tragedy  more  really  tragic  than  Titus  itself;  but  while 
there  the  tragic  gloom  is  unmixed,  here  there  are  large 
stretches  of  pure  comedy  and  others  of  pure  passion,  not 
necessarily  connected  with,  or  tending  to,  any  tragic  event 
at  all.  In  short — in  the  way  in  which  we  are,  not,  I  hope, 
improperly  handling  the  list — it  is  our  first  example  of  the 
great  English  kind  of  the  tragi  -  comedy.  Accordingly, 
the  metre  is  more  varied  than  in  Titus,  less  so  than  in  the 
three  lighter  pieces.  Doggerel  does  not  appear  at  all : 
nor,  speaking  under  correction,  do  pure  fourteeners  ;  while 
— a  more  surprising  thing  considering  the  subject — there 
are  no  lyrics,  unless  anybody  feels  inclined  to  give  that 
name  to  Mercutio's  snatches.  But  there  is  some  stanza- 
writing,  both  in  quatrain  and  sixain  (of  which  latter  form 
Shakespeare  was  for  a  time  rather  fond),  and  there  is  very 
much  more  admixture  of  rhyme  than  in  any  of  the  plays 
we  have  considered,  except  in  the  doggerel  passages  of 
them.  Romeo  and  Juliet,  indeed,  might  be  taken  as,  in 
Shakespeare's  case,  the  representative  of  the  battle  of  the 
couplet  and  of  blank  verse — they  are  sometimes  almost 
at  odds  with  each  other.  And  those  who  believe  in  its 
being  as  early  as  1591  might  take  this  for  an  argument 
on  their  side,  though  I  should  not  agree  with  them. 

But  from  and  in  this  battle  there  arises  a  curious  and 
interesting  advantage  for  blank  verse  itself.  The  couplet 
as  such,  though  capable  of  indefinite  linking,  always  tends 
rather  to  stoppage.  But  even  in  the  stopped  form,  the 
structure  and  rhythm  of  its  decasyllabic  are  markedly 
different  from  that  of  the  stopped  blank  verse  ;  while  in 
the  linked  or  enjambed  variety  that  difference  is,  of  course, 
largely  increased.  The  result  is  that  portions  of  couplet- 
verse,  small  enough  not  to  allow  the  rhyme  to  be  prominent, 
often  give  a  most  admirable  model  for  blank  verse  itself. 
For  instance,  the  two  and  a  half  lines  which  follow — 


CHAP,  i         SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  21 

It  seems  she  hangs  upon  the  cheek  of  night, 
Like  a  rich  jewel  in  an  Ethiope's  ear ; 
Beauty  too  rich  for  use — 

are  actually,  and  in  their  original  place,  part  of  a  pair  of 
couplets,  which  are  continued  by  three  others.  But  as 
they  have  just  been  printed  they  make  what  we  call  a 
"  blank  -  verse  clause,"  itself  of  almost  perfect  beauty. 
When  a  man  is  Shakespeare,  and  produces  such  an  effect 
as  that,  even  when  deliberately  doing  something  else,  it  is 
unlikely  not  to  strike  him  :  particularly  since  he  is  sure 
to  go  on  doing  it.  And  by  and  by  he  will  discard  the 
couplet  altogether  and  use  this  far  superior  medium. 

Accordingly,  we  find  in  the  play  (not  to  mention  again 
the  things  already  mentioned,  the  sonnet  prologues  and  the 
prose)  the  most  curious  alternation,  or  rather  intermixture, 
of  the  cumulative  and  the  periodic  styles  of  blank-verse 
decasyllabic.  Some  speeches,  like  that  of  the  Prince l 
after  the  opening  brawl,  seem  to  have  preserved  the  older 
model.  Friar  Laurence  also,  in  his  longer  utterances,  is 
rather  given  to  it  ;  and  there  are  many  other  examples. 
But  Juliet's  heart  beats  throughout  to  another  tune  than 
this  sententious  clank  ;  her  lover,  though  less  uniformly, 
is  master  of  the  better  rhythm  also ;  and  Mercutio  shows 
that  fancy  can  act  as  the  solvent  no  less  than  passion. 
From  his  immortal  celebration  of  Queen  Mab,  through 
Juliet's 

Gallop  apace,  you  fiery-footed  steeds, 

(where  the  Marlowesque  opening  changes  so  wonderfully 
into  the  fused  music  that  Marlowe,  with  all  his  genius, 
could  hardly  reach  and  never  command),  to  the  death- 
song  of  Romeo,  the  new  model  triumphs.  And  such  a 
triumph  as  it  obtains  in  the  last  (so  far  as  we  can  guess 
at  the  chronology  of  these  pieces)  English  poetry — nay, 
the  poetry  of  the  world — had  not  seen.  When  Dr. 
Johnson  reprehended,  in  a  famous  phrase,2  the  mixing 
of  the  methods  of  the  poet  and  the  declaimer,  he  was 

1  See  what  has  been  said  elsewhere  as  to  speeches  of  this  class. 
2  In  discussing  Milton's  verse-paragraph.      (  V.  inf.  on  Johnson  himself.) 


22  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

unconsciously  describing  the  real  virtue  of  the  thing — the 
application,  as  no  other  poetic  form  has  ever  mastered  it, 
of  the  double  appeal  of  poetry  and  rhetoric,  the  magical 
order  of  poetry  and  the  magical  apparent  freedom  of 
rhetoric.  In  that  exquisite  and  consummate  period — 

Why  art  thou  yet  so  fair  ?  shall  I  believe 

That  unsubstantial  death  is  amorous, 

And  that  the  lean  abhorred  monster  keeps 

Thee  here  in  dark  to  be  his  paramour  ? 

For  fear  of  tJiat,  I  still  -will  stay  with  thee  : 

And  never  from  this  palace  of  dim  night 

Depart  again  :  fare,  here  will  I  remain 

With  worms  that  are  thy  chamber-maids ;  0,  here 

Will  I  set  up  my  everlasting  rest, 

And  shake  the  yoke  of  inauspicious  stars, 

From  this  world-wearied flesh — 

the  poet  shows  that  he  has  nothing  left  to  learn, — that  he 
has  everything  to  teach,  with  the  exception  that  the 
redundant  syllable  and  the  trisyllabic  foot,  not  being 
wanted,  do  not  occur.  The  shift  of  the  pause  in  the 
italicised  part — fourth  syllable  in  the  first  line  ;  practically 
none  in  the  second  ;  fourth  in  the  third,  but  with  strong 
subsidiaries  at  fifth  and  sixth ;  eighth  in  the  fourth ; 
hardly  any  in  the  next  two,  and  the  broken  line  to  finish 
with — is  therefore  almost  the  sole  device  used  of  a  tangible 
character  ;  but  the  /cwXa,  the  members  of  the  line,  or  lines, 
which  these  pauses  outline,  are  internally  arranged  with 
incomparable  subtlety.1 
A  Midsummer  Next  to  Romeo  and  Juliet  there  are  strong  prosodic 
reasons  for  taking  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream.  As  a 
non -tragic  pendant  to  the  tragic  counterpart,  it  offers  a 
temptation  to  do  so ;  and  that  this  is  not  merely  a 
temptation,  is  shown  by  the  presence  in  it  of  the  same 
admixture  of  a  certain  juvenility  with  power  already  of 
the  very  highest.  Perhaps  there  is  a  little  touch  of 

1  I  hope  many  of  my  readers  will  excuse  what  only  a  few  may  need — 
the  reminder  that  I  have  not  the  slightest  intention  of  suggesting  that 
Shakespeare  said  to  himself,  "Go  to:  let  us  put  a  pause  at  the  jrth  place, 
that  we  may  produce  this  or  that  effect."  Nor  do  I  think  that,  in  the  same 
century,  Titian  said,  "  Let  us  bend  such  and  such  of  our  muscles  in  such  and 
such  a  manner  that  we  may  draw  Ariadne."  But  they  both  did  it. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  23 

further  age  in  it — more  critical  and  satiric  grasp,  nicer 
composition, — but  all  this  is  for  another  story.  Prosodic- 
ally,  it  comes  in  as  hardly  anything  else  could.  We 
must  once  more  remember  that  we  have  here  the  comic 
licence  of  variety  ;  and  the  fact  that  that  variety  does  not 
run,  as  it  does  in  the  Errors  and  in  Love's  Labour's  Lost, 
to  doggerel,  shows  a  further  advance.  The  fact  that  it 
does  run  to  great  lengths  shows  that  we  are  still  at  an 
early  stage  of  the  poet's  development.  The  beautiful 
octosyllables  and  the  serious  lyrics  we  shall  take  later 
with  their  kin  ;  but  the  burlesques  of  the  "  tedious,  brief 
scene "  are  too  important  prosodically,  and  too  unique 
not  to  require  a  short  separate  treatment  at  once. 

We  have  seen  above  (Vol.  i.  Bk.  iii.  Ch.  I.)  that  the 
original  dramatic  performances  of  the  guilds  indulged  in 
an  extreme  prosodic  variety,  and  we  have  also  seen  (ibid.} 
that,  in  the  Interludes  and  other  sixteenth -century  suc- 
cessors of  these,  doggerel  of  various  kinds  rode  almost 
sovereign.  Shakespeare  seems  to  have  seen  his  oppor- 
tunity for  a  dramatic  Sir  Thopas  here,  and  he  certainly 
made  the  most  of  it.  That  he  is  not  always  original — 
that,  for  instance,  the  "  misperusing "  of  poor  Quince's 
Prologue  is  borrowed  from  Ralph  Roister  Doister,  whose 
author  (as  Thackeray  says  of  another  subject)  no  doubt 
borrowed  it  from  somebody  else  —  does  not  matter. 
The  absurdity  combined  with  the  prosodic  correctness 
and  almost  ease  of  the  stanzas,  the  couplets,  and  the 
short-lined  lyrics  is  unpayable,  except  with  recognition  of 
its  merits,  and  of  the  indication  which  it  gives  of  its 
author's  prosodic  progress. 

In  the  body  of  the  play  there  is  a  good  deal  of  rhymed 
couplet,  just  as  there  is  in  Romeo  and  Juliet ;  but  in  the 
blank -verse  staple  there  is  a  most  remarkable  change. 
In  the  tragedy,  as  we  saw,  the  crude  and  the  perfect 
blank  verse — the  medium  which  is  still  made  up,  like  a 
surveyor's  measuring-chain,  of  units  linked  together,  and 
that  which  is  as  integral  and  undulating  as  a  serpent — 
alternate  with  each  other.  Such  alternation  is  not  absent 
in  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  but  the  live  variety  has 


24  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

altogether  the  upper  hand.  Even  the  short  opening 
speeches l  of  Theseus  and  Hippolyta  are  couched  in  it : 
and  though  the  Duke's  second  speech  falls  back  rather 
into  the  older  strain  of  these  set  harangues,  that  of 
Egeus  (which  follows  so  quickly,  and  which  in  any  earlier 
play  would  probably,  as  we  have  seen,  have  been  quite  of 
the  chain-pattern)  is  not.  But  in  the  great  Oberon-and- 
Titania  passage  of  the  Second  Act  comes  one  of  the  most 
important  loci  for  our  purpose.  Most  of  this  would  earlier 
have  been  in  the  stiffer  form,  for  the  speeches  are  long 
and  set.  Nor  is  this  form  quite  absent  ;  but  it  is  con- 
stantly fused,  not,  as  in  some  other  pieces  that  we  have 
seen,  by  passion  or  by  fancy,  so  much  as  by  the  poet's 
growing  facility  in  the  other  and  higher  kind,  and  his 
conscious,  or  unconscious,  conviction  that  it  is  the  higher. 
Redundant  syllables  and  trisyllabic  feet  are  still  absent, 
as  a  rule ;  but  in  other  ways  the  newer  kind  is  victorious, 
and  the  older  (see  Puck's  speech  in  Act  III.  Sc.  ii.) 
seems  actually  to  be  taking  refuge  in  the  couplet  passages 
when  it  has  been  driven  out  of  its  ancient  stronghold 
of  "  blanks  " — a  most  curious  instance  of  the  "  exchange 
of  rapiers."  The  rhymed  part  of  the  central  scene  of 
confusion  goes  out  of  its  way  to  be  single- moulded. 
Helena's  pathetic  blank -verse  appeals  are  almost  com- 
pletely interknitted.  So,  too,  indignatio  facit  "  blancos  " 
versus  for  Hermia  later ;  and  her  passion  gets  in  even 
the  trisyllabic  foot  in — 

And  with  j  her  per \sonageki  her  \  tall  perjsonage. 

Aits  Weil  The  most  puzzling  and  (but  for  Parolles  and,  perhaps, 
dS  Lafeu)  the  most  un-Shakespearian  of  all  the  plays,  All's 
Well  that  Ends  Well,  although  it  is  not  exactly  a  puzzle 
prosodically,  is  not  very  easy  to  place  in  the  combined 
respect  of  prosody  and  chronology.  There  is  none  of 
the  early  medley — prose,  blank  verse,  and  the  usual  drop 

1  This  is  probably  because  they  are  short,  and  not  of  the  tirade  or 
harangue  kind. 

-  On  what  some  people  call  an  extra-metrical  syllable  here,  to  escape  the 
abhorred  trisyllabic  foot,  see  later.  As  for  others,  who  would  read  "purs- 
nidge  "  in  one  place  and  the  proper  word  in  the  other,  non  ragioiiiam. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  25 

into  couplet  pretty  well  exhaust  its  variety.  But  the 
man  who  wrote  it,  whosoever  he  was,  and  at  whatsoever 
time  he  wrote,  seems  to  be  experimenting  with  blank 
verse  itself  in  a  rather  different  fashion  from  that  which 
we  find  in  any  other  play,  earlier  or  later.  Thus  the 
King's  speech  in  II.  iii. — 

Tis  only  title  thou  disdain'st  in  her,  the  which — 

(an  Alexandrine,  in  itself  noteworthy)  is  evidently  written 
with  a  definite  attempt  to  break  up  the  lines — 

In  differences  so  mighty.      If  she  be 

It  is  a  dropsied  honour.      Good  alone 
Is  good  without  a  name.     Vileness  is  so  : 
The  property  by  what  it  is  should  go, 
Not  by  the  title. 

But,  it  will  be  observed,  the  speaker  has  already  dropped 
into  rhyme,  in  which  he  continues  to  the  end  of  the 
speech  ;  and  his  junctures  want  the  nail — they  are  harsh 
and  grating.  Yet  there  are  attempts  here,  much  more 
often  than  earlier,  at  the  other  great  devices  for  variation — 
trisyllabic  feet  and  redundant  syllables — besides  occasional 
Alexandrines,  as  noted.1 

1  Two  curiously  ugly   but  representative  speeches   follow  each   other   in 
II.  i.  :— 

King.  I  knew  him. 

Hel.   The  rather  will  I  spare  my  praises  towards  him  ; 
Knowing  him  is  enough.      On's  bed  of  death 
Many  receipts  he  gave  me  ;  chiefly  one, 
Which,  as  the  dearest  issue  of  his  practice, 
And  of  his  old  experience  the  only  darling, 
He  bade  me  store  up,  as  a  triple  eye, 
Safer  than  mine  own  two,  more  dear ;  I  have  so  ; 
And,  hearing  your  high  majesty  is  touch'd 
With  that  malignant  cause  wherein  the  honour 
Of  my  dear  father's  gift  stands  chief  in  power, 
I  come  to  tender  it  and  my  appliance 
With  all  bound  humbleness. 

King.  We  thank  you,  maiden  ; 

But  may  not  be  so  credulous  of  cure, 
When  our  most  learned  doctors  leave  us  and 
The  congregated  college  have  concluded 
That  labouring  art  can  never  ransom  nature 
From  her  inaidible  estate  ;  I  say  we  must  not 
So  stain  our  judgement,  or  corrupt  our  hope, 


26  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

The  Early  The  early  historical  plays  mentioned  by  Meres,  and 

the  enigmatical  Henry  VI.  batch,  will  be  best  taken  to- 
gether from  the  prosodic  point  of  view.  As  is  well 
known,  Shakespeare's  part  in  most  of  them  is  mixed  up 
with  other  and  probably  earlier  work,  to  a  rather  bewilder- 
ing extent.  But  it  is  the  great  advantage  of  our  subject 
and  our  method  that  the  question  of  authorship  hardly 
concerns  us  at  all,  or  only  indirectly  and  secondarily.  It 
is  the  "  Progress  of  Prosody "  which  the  present  writer, 
not  being  able  to  "  sing,"  is  ambitious  to  "  say."  And  of 
this  progress  there  is  plentiful  and  interesting  evidence  in 
comparing  the  two  sets.  The  blank  verse,  for  instance, 
of  The  Troublesome  Raigne  of  King  John  is,  as  is  that  of 
all  the  doubles,1  strongly  of  the  "  University,"  the  single- 
moulded,  the  cumulative  type.  Nor  has  Shakespeare 
himself  quite,  though  he  has  partly,  broken  with  the  type 
— he  is  in  the  Romeo  and  Juliet  not  the  Titus  Andronicus 
stage  of  his  apprenticeship.  When  he  sees  a  possible 
good  line,  if  it  is  only  a  string  of  names  like 

That  England,  Ireland,  Poitiers,  Anjou,  Touraine,  Maine, 

he  takes  and  turns  it  into  an  actually  good  one  of  the 
same  type — 

To  Ireland,  Poitiers,  Anjou,  Touraine,  Maine. 

To  prostitute  our  past-cure  malady 

To  empirics,  or  to  dissever  so 

Our  great  self  and  our  credit,  to  esteem 

A  senseless  help  when  help  past  sense  we  deem. 

For  trisyllables  see  Helena's  speech  to  the  widow  at  the  end  of  Act  III. — 
When  I  have  found  it.     The  count  he  woos  your  daughter, 
Resolved  to  carry  her  :  let  her  in  fine  consent, 
Since  the  first  father  wore  it :  this  ring  he  holds. 

All  at  the  caesura;  all  explicable,  if  anybody  likes  such  things,  as  "extra- 
metrical  "  ;  all  exceedingly  ugly  ;  but  all,  according  to  my  notation,  distinctly 
trisyllabic.  The  author  of  all  these  things  is  clearly  experimenting ;  but  his 
Love's  Labour  is  not  yet  Won,  though  we  take  his  play  here  on  the  chance 
that  Meres  may  have  so  named  it. 

1  I    use  for   this    work    Hazlitt's    reprint,    with    additions,    of  Collier's 
Shakespeare's  Library,  6  vols.,  London,  1875. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  27 

But  generally  he  re-founds  the  metre  as  completely  as  King  John. 
the  diction  ;  and  the  dull  stump  of  the  original  changes 
into  the  passionate  or  fanciful  airs  of  the  rehandling  as  if 
by  miracle.  The  form  of  the  blank  verse  is  still  of  the 
austerer  kind,  but  in  that  kind  it  gives  some  of  his 
greatest  and  best  known  triumphs,  proceeding  from  still 
cumulative  specimens  (though  the  cumulation  is  here 
disguised  by  the  Bastard's  abundant  fancy),  like  Falcon- 
bridge's  soliloquy  on  his  Lackland  Knighthood,  through  the 
stately  tirades  of  the  kings  and  the  First  Citizen,  through 
Constance's  never-to-be-hackneyed  despair,  and  the  other 
famous  pieces,  all  slightly  single-line  in  their  constitution, 
till,  as  usual,  the  greatest  passion  of  all  brings  the  point 
of  projection  with  it,  and  an  impeccable  specimen  in  the 
later  kind  is  given  by  the  wonderful  lines  which  wrest 
pity  for  almost  the  vilest  of  all  heroes — 

Poison' d, — ill  fare — dead,  forsook,  cast  off: 1 

And  none  of  you  will  bid  the  winter  come 

To  thrust  his  icy  fingers  in  my  maw, 

Nor  let  my  kingdom's  rivers  take  their  course 

Through  my  burn'd  bosom,  nor  entreat  the  north 

To  make  his  bleak  winds  kiss  my  parched  lips 

And  comfort  me  with  cold.2 

As  for  the  "  rough  copy "  plays  themselves,  com-  The  Doubles 
paratively  few  remarks  must  serve  them,  though  it  would  gen< 
be  interesting  (to  the  writer,  that  is  to  say)  to  be  much 
more  diffuse.  They  stand  in  three  classes  prosodically.  The 
True  Tragedy  of  Richard  Iff.  and  The  Famous  Victories 
of  Henry  V.  are  in  almost  the  lowest  stage  of  blank-verse 
doggerel,  as  we  may  call  it,  though  they  acquire  con- 
siderable interest,  when  we  compare  them  with  that  other 
stage  to  which  we  shall  come  in  the  decadence  of  blank 
verse  itself,  some  half  century  later.  It  will  not,  of  course, 
do  to  judge  them  merely  as  printed  ;  for  some  of  the 
prose  passages  are  clearly  verse  in  intention,  and  many 
of  the  verse  passages  were  probably  meant  to  be  simple 
prose.  It  is,  however,  rare  that  even  a  tolerable  single 

1  Note  the  "pause-foot"  or  half-foot  here  in  the  first  line. 

2  The  actually  last  speech  ("  O  cousin,  thou  art  come")  is  single-moulded 
again. 


28  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

line  emerges,  while  a  tolerable  batch  of  lines  is  almost 
unknown.  The  Troublesome  Raigne,  on  the  other  hand, 
is  a  very  fair,  though  by  no  means  a  first-rate  specimen 
of  the  chain-stitch  blank  verse  of  the  Wits.  And  in  the 
two  parts  of  the  Contention,  compared  with  the  three  of 
Henry  VI.,  we  have  one  of  the  most  attractive  special 
prosodic  studies  imaginable,  though  one  of  which  only 
the  general  results  can  be  indicated  here. 

Htnty  vi.  Generally  speaking,  the  process  of  editing  is  performed 

by  persons  who  have  not  genius,  upon  persons  who  have.1 
Here  the  positions  are  capitally  and  signally  reversed. 
One  parallel  (from  the  great  passage  of  the  Cardinal's 
death)  will  prove  this  as  well  as  fifty.  The  Contention 
has — 

Lord  Cardinal,  if  thou  diest  assured  of  Heavenly  bliss 
Hold  up  thy  hand  and  make  some  sign  to  us. 
Oh,  see  !  he  dies,  and  makes  no  sign  at  all ! 
Oh  God  !  forgive  his  soul ! 

In  Henry  VI.  it  is — 

Lord  Cardinal !  if  thou  think'st  on  Heaven's  bliss, 

Hold  up  thy  hand  ;  make  signal  of  thy  hope  ! 

He  dies  and  makes  no  sign.      O  God  !  forgive  him  ! 

Shakespeare  for  a  thousand  ducats  :  even  Aut  Diabolus 
being  out  of  the  question  in  the  circumstances.2 
Richard  in.  Of  the  other  historical  plays  mentioned  by  Meres, 
Richard  the  Third,  despite  the  glorious  things  that  it 
contains,  bears  the  earliest  appearance  prosodically.  The 
splendid  opening  soliloquy  of  Gloucester  still  has  the 
pant,  the  gasp,  of  the  older  model,  and  its  intrinsic 
uniformity  ;  and  so  have  Anne's  Prologue  and  Gloucester's 
own  central  speech  in  the  incomparable  wooing-scene, 

1  I  believe  I  have  edited  enough  myself  to  say  this  without  impertinence 
to  others. 

2  If  space  permitted,  many  other  things  in  this  most  interesting  trilogy 
would  be  discussed.     The  great  Towton  speech   of  the  King,   III.   II.  v. 
("  This  battle  fares  like  to  the  morning's  war  "),  is  a  text  for  a  complete  sermon 
on  Shakespeare's  blank  verse  in   the  apprenticeship  period  ;  and  it  would 
not  be  difficult  to  make  up  the  "  fifty  "  referred  to  in  the  text.     I  own  to 
very  great  affection  for  Henry  VI.     It  is  a  historical  novel  of  the  best  kind, 
with  the  joy  of  verse  added. 


CHAP,  i         SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  29 


which  is  the  triumph  of  impossibility  made  probable  as 
far  as  dramatic  character  is  concerned  ;  and  the  Prince's 
Mephistophelian  conclusion  thereto.  Even  Margaret's 
magnificent 

I  called  thee,  then,  vain  flourish  of  my  fortune 

is  the  very  paragon  of  the  style.  Marlowe  himself, 
though  he  shoots  higher  for  a  little  space  here  and  there, 
never  holds  the  heavens  of  declamation  in  which  passion 
does  not  sleep,  so  royally  and  long.1  Only  in  the  two 
apices  of  the  whole,  the  Clarence  passage  and  Richard's 
desperate  awakening  (with  perhaps  the  repentant  death- 
words  of  Edward)  is  the  other  and  greater  method  tried 
with  complete  success  ;  and  even  in  these  the  mould  of 
the  verse  tends  towards  rigidity.  It  is  as  if  Shakespeare, 
in  this  chronologically  final  division  of  the  long  pageant 
of  historic  tragedy  which  his  predecessors  had  attempted 
with  such  varying  success,  determined  to  give  the  method 
of  those  predecessors  its  full  chance — to  get  out  of  it  every- 
thing that  could  be  got — and  so  an  end. 

It  would  be  in  accordance  with  such  a  plan  that  the  Henry  iv. 
play  is  almost  wholly  in  verse.  In  Henry  IV.,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  best  and  most  characteristic  passages,  as 
was  necessitated  by  the  grasp  of  comedy  which  the  author 
had  now  made  sure,  are  wholly  in  prose,  or  versed  only 
in  snatches  which  are  mainly  burlesque.  The  blank  verse 
would  seem  to  have  received  no  very  special  attention  ; 
and  though  a  good  deal  of  it  is  in  the  older  model,  the 
newer  seems  to  come  from  him  less  of  deliberate  purpose 
than  because  his  hand  was  getting  accustomed  to  it. 
The  King  opens  (as  usual)  in  the  one,  and  Hotspur  denies 

1  If  the  play  were  not  among  the  most  universally  known  even  of  Shake- 
speare's, I  think  I  must  have  quoted  this  gorgeous  tirade.  It  has  redundant 
syllables  (six  out  of  some  thirty)  ;  but,  as  we  have  seen,  though  the  frequency 
of  these  is  a  mark  of  lateness,  their  occasional  occurrence  does  not  prevent  a 
piece  being  early.  And  they  are  mostly  "  very  little  ones  "  : — fortune,  bubt>/e, 
brothers,  wid^w,  sorrow.  There  is  one  trisyllabic  foot  (the  flatjtering  in|dex), 
but  it  is  easily  slurred.  On  the  other  hand,  the  "single-mould"  is  all  but 
universal ;  epanaphora  (which  disjoins  the  lines  specially)  is  prominent,  and 
it  bears  the  full  hall-mark  of  the  workshop  of  which  it  is  one  of  the  greatest 
triumphs. 


30  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

that  he  denied  his  prisoners  in  the  other.  But  he  himself 
relapses  in  the  "  Cankered  Bolingbroke  "  harangue  to  his 
father  and  uncle,  and  comes  back  again  in  his  satire  on 
Glendower.  Lady  Percy  is  very  nearly  perfect  in  the 
newer  numbers,  when  she  tries  to  keep  her  father-in-law 
from  rushing  on  his  fate  ;  and  the  King  is  between  the 
two  in  his  celebrated  apostrophe  to  Sleep :  while  the 
Prince,  as  is  fitting,  "  likes  the  youngest  best,"  in  his  to 
the  Crown.  In  fact  the  poet  is  by  this  time  nearly  at 
mastery  of  the  newer  measure  in  its  older  form — that 
which  has  got  over  the  stand-off  disposition  of  the 
lines  towards  each  other,  but  has  not  yet  com- 
pletely achieved  variety  of  music  and  structure  in  the 
lines  themselves. 

Richard  ii.  The  prosodic,  like  the  other  interest  of  Richard  21., 
arising  from  the  comparison  with  Marlowe  on  the  other 
hapless  "  Second,"  is  exceptional,  and  it  can  hardly  escape 
any  reader  who  has  got  beyond  the  state  of  thinking 
prosody  pedantry.  There  can,  of  course,  be  not  the 
slightest  doubt  that  it  was  written  under  the  influence  of 
the  hardly  older  but  rather  more  precocious  poet  and  his 
fellows  ;  nor  is  there  any  play  which  is  more  likely  to 
have  been  the  direct  occasion  of  Greene's  splenetic  out- 
burst. The  single-line  model  is  conspicuous  throughout ; 
and  there  are  few  finer  instances  of  it  anywhere  than  in 
the  famous  "  rally  "  of  Gaunt  and  his  exiled  son — 

All  places  that  the  eye  of  Heaven  visits 
O  who  can  hold  a  fire  in  his  hand,1 

to  the  King's  final  soliloquy  just  before  his  murder.  But 
whereas  in  Titus  Andronicus  this  model  showed  but  a 
few  marks  of  approaching  change  by  fusion,  here  these 
marks  are  ubiquitous.  Even  in  some  of  the  passages  just 
referred  to  they  appear.  It  is  specially  curious  to  notice 
how,  in  the  great  patriotic  speech  of  Gaunt,  the  central 

1  Both  these  are  good  instances  of  the  distinction  I  have  tried  to  draw 
between  the  "single-moulded"  and  the  merely  ''end-stopped"  line. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  31 

passage,1  although  almost  every  line  is  self-enclosed  as  a 
line,  the  paragraph- effect  is  given  in  a  way  that  Marlowe 
hardly  ever  attains,  by  the  variation  of  the  pause,  the 
weighting  of  different  parts  of  the  line  by  the  quicksilver 
power  of  specially  sonorous  or  important  words,  and  some- 
times by  a  cunning  parenthetic  device  which  makes  the 
voice  hurry  over  parts  of  a  line,  or  whole  lines,  so  as  to 
connect,  rhythmically  as  in  sense,  what  comes  after  with 
what  comes  before.  Indeed  the  rhetorical  -  poetical 
"  colour "  which  Shakespeare  has  conveyed  to  his  blank 
verse  in  this  play,  may  vie  with  almost  anything  later  ; 
though  the  actual  drawing  and  composition  of  the  lines 
are  less  varied  and  delicate.  This  is  the  case  with 
Richard's  speech  to  Aumerle,  his  despairing  reception  of 
the  news  of  the  death  of  his  friends,  and  his  other 
"  epideictics."  And  it  is  worth  observing  that  the  charge, 
so  often  brought  against  this  play,  that  the  rhetorical 
character  rather  outvies  the  strictly  poetical,  whether  just 
or  not  (which  does  not  concern  us),  connects  itself  very 
interestingly  with  the  undoubted  prosodic  symptoms  and 
stage  of  it.  It  is  the  work  of  a  man  at  once  striving 

1  This  royal  throne  of  kings,  this  scepter'd  isle, 
This  earth  of  majesty,  this  seat  of  Mars, 
This  other  Eden,  demi-paradise, 
This  fortress  built  by  Nature  for  herself 
Against  infection  and  the  hand  of  war, 
This  happy  breed  of  men,  this  little  world, 
This  precious  stone  set  in  the  silver  sea, 
Which  serves  it  in  the  office  of  a  wall 
Or  as  a  moat  defensive  to  a  house, 
Against  the  envy  of  less  happier  lands, 
This  blessed  plot,  this  earth,  this  realm,  this  England, 
This  nurse,  this  teeming  womb  of  royal  kings, 
Fear'd  by  their  breed  and  famous  by  their  birth, 
Renowned  for  their  deeds  as  far  from  home, 
For  Christian  service  and  true  chivalry, 
As  is  the  sepulchre  in  stubborn  Jewry 
Of  the  world's  ransom,  blessed  Mary's  Son, 
This  land  of  such  dear  souls,  this  dear  dear  land, 
Dear  for  her  reputation  through  the  world, 
Is  now  leased  out,  I  die  pronouncing  it, 
Like  to  a  tenement  or  pelting  farm  : 
England,  bound  in  with  the  triumphant  sea, 
Whose  rocky  shore  beats  back  the  envious  siege 
Of  watery  Neptune,  is  now  bound  in  with  shame, 
With  inky  blots  and  rotten  parchment  bonds. 


32  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

(whether  consciously  or  not  does  not  in  the  least  matter) 
to  write  up  to  a  certain  model,  and  beyond  it.  Nobody, 
not  even  Shakespeare,  could  do  this  without  producing  a 
certain  effect  of  artifice  and  labour. 

The  Merchant  The  last  of  the  Meres-mentioned  plays,  The  Merchant 
of  Venice,  from  its  being  one  of  the  most  popular  of  all,  both 
in  stage  and  study,  has  also  been  one  of  those  which  have 
attracted  the  most  prosodic  attention.  It  has,  however, 
from  this  point  of  view  unnecessarily  puzzled  those  who 
are  unhappy  unless  they  can  assign  a  date,  and  a  fixed 
one,  to  each  play  as  a  whole.  As  for  me,  I  judge,  securus, 
that  it  is  one  of  those  which  represent  not  necessarily 
very  long  intervals,  but  certainly  intervals,  of  work,  with 
correspondingly  different  stages  of  study,  practice,  and 
accomplishment.  Not  even  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream, 
though  the  actual  variety  of  metre  in  it  may  be  greater,  has 
passages  representing  such  different  grades  of  apprentice- 
ship and  craftsmanship.  The  Casket  scenes,  especially 
those  with  Morocco  and  Arragon,  are  notoriously  of  the 
earlier  type  —  not  directly  Marlowesque,  for  there  is 
much  more  enjambment  than  in  Marlowe,  but  sententious 
and  staccato  for  all  that  enjambment.  Not  a  few  of  the 
earlier  set  speeches,  especially  that  of  Salarino  about  the 
dangers  of  the  sea,  are  of  the  half-and-half  kind  :  while 
not  merely  Portia's  diploma-piece  for  her  doctor's  gown 
but  many  other  speeches  of  hers,  nearly  all  of  Shylock's, 
and  much  else,  are  on  the  perfectly  or  almost  perfectly 
fused  model  —  not  far  from  Antony  and  Cleopatra 
itself. 

The  later  After  Meres's  list  we  have,  in  fact,  no  thoroughly 

satisfactory  dates  for  Shakespearian  production  ;  though 
we  know  too  well  when  that  production  must  have 
stopped.  The  apparently  more  certain  evidences  of 
entries  of  licensing  or  printing,  the  order  of  performance, 
and  the  infinitely  uncertain  ones  of  allusion  to  events 
which  commentators  have  worked  so  hard,  would  be 
treacherous  testimony  for  us  anyhow  ;  and,  as  it  happens, 
we  do  not  want  them.  The  actual  prosodic  progress 
— from  a  pot-pourri  of  metres  with  stiff  blank  verse,  or 


CHAP,  i         SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  33 

from  the  latter  alone,  to  a  complete  command  of  blank 
verse  itself;  and  then,  perhaps,  a  slight  tendency,  not 
exactly  to  abuse  but  to  use  very  lavishly  the  redundant 
syllable — is  logically  too  convincing  and  too  well  supported 
by  the  general  comparison  of  the  plays  before  1598  with 
the  plays  after  it,  to  need  much  argument.  Having  once 
laid  down  the  law  of  it,  a  slight  survey  of  these  plays 
themselves,  for  the  most  part  in  their  canonical 
(though  most  certainly  not  chronological  order),  will 
suffice.1 

Whatever  the  heretical  eccentrics  who  deny  the  late-  The  Tempest. 
ness  of  The  Tempest  may  have  to  say  for  themselves  (I 
have  never  been  able  to  discover  in  it  anything  of  value) 
on  other  grounds,  it  is  certain  that  they  can  derive  no 
countenance  from  prosody.  It  is  simply  impossible,  to 
any  one  who  has  made  a  careful  prosodic  study  of  the 
plays  in  the  Meres  list,  that  The  Tempest  should  be  early. 
There  is  hardly  so  much  as  a  trace  of  the  old  staccato 
line,  even  in  passages  such  as  Ariel's  to  the  "  three  men 
of  sin,"  and  some  of  Prospero's  which  would,  in  the  early 
period,  have  irresistibly  invited  it.  The  couplets  of  the 
Masque,  indeed,  show  something  of  the  type  ;  but  there 
is  no  reason  whatever  why  these  should  not  have  been 
written  earlier,  and  perhaps  without  any  view  to  their 
actual  place  of  appearance.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
actual  type  is  of  the  most  advanced  kind — the  "fingering" 
of  the  overlapped  lines  exhibiting  absolutely  perfect 
mastery,  and  the  abundant  redundances  indicating  that 
tendency,  almost  to  take  liberties  with  licence,  which  was 
to  prove  so  dangerous  when  the  wand  slipped  out  of 
Prospero's  hand.2 

1  I  fear  my  arrangement  may  prove  teasing  to  some  readers ;  but  I  do 
not  see  my  way  to  alteration.      For  I  wish  at  any  cost  to  avoid  a  hard-and- 
fast  ordering,  even  on  purely  prosodic  grounds,  inasmuch  as  I  do  not  believe 
in  the  possibility  of  such  a  thing  on  any ;  and  I  wish  to  respect,  as  far  as 
possible,   the    solid    facts    of  the    Meres  list,   the   Folio  contents,   and    the 
parallelism  of  the  inside  and  outside  Histories. 

2  This  is  not  a  Beauties  of  Shakespeare ;  but  it  can  hardly  be  inexcusable 
to  note  that  the  very  Mount  Everest  of  the  blank  verse  region — the  passage 
that  is  "rounded  with  a  sleep,"  the  deepest  peace  over  the  highest  peak — 
occurs  in  The  Tempest. 

VOL.  II  D 


34 


THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


BOOK  V 


The  later  (?) 
Comedies. 
The  Merry 
Wives. 


Measure  for 
Measure. 


As  You  Like 
It. 


The  Merry  Wives  (we  shall  silently  pass  over  the 
plays  already  mentioned)  is  very  largely  prose,  or  blank 
verse  of  the  masterly  prose-verse  style  elsewhere  to  be 
noted.  The  exceptions  are  not  prosodically  very  remark- 
able, but  rather  of  the  accomplished  early  time  than  of  a 
later. 

Measure  for  Measure,  however,  is,  in  prosodic  as  in 
other  respects,  something  of  a  puzzle.  It  is  generally 
taken  as  a  rather  late  play.  I  have  always  myself  been 
pretty  sure,  for  reasons  by  no  means  wholly  prosodic, 
that  it  is  in  part  an  early  one.  For  instance,  Shakespeare 
surely  never  drew  Pompey  after  he  had  conceived  his 
greater  clowns,  nor  Lucio  after  he  had  drawn  Benedick 
or  even  Sir  Toby.  But  the  blank  verse  is  certainly 
mixed.  None  of  it,  perhaps,  is  of  the  earliest  type,  and 
some  of  it  is,  if  not  of  the  latest,  of  a  late  kind,  as  in  the 
terror-struck  eloquence  of  Claudio,  and  the  Duke's  great 
but  ineffectual  exhortation  which  precedes  it.  But  in 
some  places — especially  in  the  opening  passages,  where 
the  same  Duke  unfolds  his  exceedingly  unstatesmanlike 
design,  and  that  a  little  later  when  he  reveals  the  rather 
ungenerous  reason  of  it  to  Friar  Thomas — there  are  all 
the  marks  of  imperfect  accomplishment.  Abrupt  ends 
occur  side  by  side  with  divided  middles  ;  large  redundancy 
with  a  stiff  and  sententious  form  of  the  individual  line. 
Judging  by  prosody  only,  one  would  say  that  the  play 
had  been  more  than  once  begun,  and  more  than  once 
left  off. 

There  is  nothing  of  this  kind  about  As  You  Like  It, 
which  is  "  of  the  Cabinet "  ;  a  capital  example  of  the 
plays  where  the  poet,  whatever  he  wants  to  do  prosodic- 
ally, does  it  without  the  slightest  difficulty,  and  with 
perfect  success.  It  has,  as  befits  a  comedy,  much  prose  ; 
but  as  soon  as  it  suits  the  author  to  drop  into  poetry,  his 
blank  verse  is  of  the  absolutely  perfect  type — so  easy  that 
it  alternates  with  prose  itself  without  any  sense  of  jar, 
and  yet  perfectly  modulated  and  rhythmed.  There  is 
not  a  very  great  deal  of  redundancy ;  it  is  not  late 
enough  for  that.  But  the  poet  never  hesitates  at  the 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  35 

extra-syllable  when  he  wants  it,  and  never  fails  to  want 
it  to  good  purpose.  If  there  is  anywhere  a  falling  back 
on  the  stopped  type  it  is,  perhaps,  in  Phoebe's 

I  would  not  be  thy  executioner ; 

and  there,  as  elsewhere,  it  is  probably  done  on  purpose. 

In    The    Taming  of  the   Shrew,   on    the   other   hand,  Taming  of  the 
which  is  certainly  earlier,  this   type  is  paramount :    not Skrew- 
indeed  of  the  stiffest,  but  much  suppled  and  eased  by  the 
genius   of  the   adapter -author,   and    found    side   by   side 
with  much  jointed  conversation-verse  of  a  fairly  accom- 
plished kind. 

Twelfth  Night  puts  itself  behind  (that  is  to  say,  before)  Twelfth 
As  You  Like  It  by  a  somewhat  greater  predominance  oiNiSht- 
the  self-centred  line,  with  the  tendency  (which  seems  to 
accompany  that  predominance,  but  which  is,  of  course,  a 
cause  precedent  rather  than  a  result  of  it)  towards  constant 
dropping  into  rhyme.  The  very  beautiful  opening  speech 
of  the  Duke  is  of  this  kind  ;  yet  it  is  imperatively 
necessary  to  observe  that  though  there  is  somewhat  too 
much  of  a  tendency  to  turn  the  bullets  out  and  nip  off 
their  junction  singly,  yet  there  is  the  fullest  sense  of  the 
importance  of  varying  them  individually.  The  opening 
speeches  of  all  Shakespeare's  plays,  except  the  very 
earliest,  are  almost  invariably  documents  for  this  process 
of  pause -variation.  The  "  end -stopping,"  however,  con- 
tinues. It  is  notorious  (the  warning  must  again  be 
repeated  that  it  is  not  identical  with  end-punctuation)  in 
Viola's  prettiest  sighings  ;  in  Olivia's  stateliness  and 
surrender  alike ;  almost  (though  of  course  not  quite) 
everywhere.  At  the  same  time,  the  very  large  amount 
of  prose  in  the  play  curtails  the  opportunity  of  variation. 
And  the  same  is  the  case  with  Much  Ado  about  Nothing,  Muck  Ado. 
which  was,  therefore,  omitted  from  its  proper  place  in  the 
folio  list.  Except  that  Twelfth  Night  is  the  purest 
comedy  and  Much  Ado  very  nearly  tragic,  these  plays 
run  indeed  very  much  in  a  curricle  prosodically,  though 
the  last  named  is  a  little  the  more  mature.  The  principal 
blank-verse  scene — that  of  the  false  accusation  brought 


36  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

against  Hero  in  the  church,  and  the  council  held  after 
it — is  very  well  illustrative  of  the  later  form  of  stopped 
verse,  which  has  actually  chipped  itself  free  to  a  great 
extent  from  the  mere  shell  of  the  earlier  mould,  but  has 
not  yet  fully  spread  and  freely  used  the  wings  of 
rhythmical  undulation.1 

The  Winters         In  The  Winters  Tale  we  have  blank  verse  of  the  very 
Tale.  latest  kind,  which  shows  what  it  can  do  poetically  in  the 

famous  and  incomparable  flower- speech  of  Perdita,  but 
is  on  the  whole  (for  Shakespeare  was  an  experimenter 
to  all  but  the  last)  rather  more  loose-girt  than  the  medium 
of  The  Tempest.  The  writer  not  only  indulges  in  the 
redundant  syllable  freely,  but  is  particularly  fond  of 
making  his  coupling  foot  with  the  next  line  redundant 2- 
a  distinctly  hazardous  tour  de  force  which,  when  attempted 
in  the  next  generation,  had  much  to  do  with  the  un- 
buttoning and  unbuckling  of  blank  verse  altogether.  So, 
too,  he  is  also  fond  of  fashioning  this  union  3  out  of  the 
conjunction  "  and  " — a  perfectly  justifiable  thing,  except  in 
the  eyes  or  ears  of  those  who,  to  this  day,  do  not  know 
what  Stanyhurst  knew  three  hundred  years  ago  and  more, 
the  double  quantity  of  that  useful  monosyllable  and 
others  ;  but,  again,  a  dangerous  one  in  unskilful  hands. 
There  is  almost  a  redundance  of  redundances  themselves  : 
though  one  may  trust  the  master  one  cannot  trust  his 
scholars  not  to  forget  that,  when  licences  and  exceptions 
go  beyond  a  certain  proportion,  they  lose  their  own 
justification  as  variety,  and  do  not  often  acquire  a  fresh 
one  as  norm.  There  might  be  some  reason  for  thinking 
The  Winter's  Tale  Shakespeare's  first  experiment  in  very 

1  To  attempt  to  "place"  this  batch  (with  The  Merchant  of  Venice)  too 
exactly  would  be  to  commit  the  very  fault  which  seems  to  me  gravest  in  the 
usual  commentator.  The  Taming  of  the  Shrew  ought  to  be  the  earliest ; 
As  You  Like  It  must  be  the  latest.  Twelfth  Night  and  Much  Ado  should 
come  between  them,  and  are  much  of  a  piece  in  themselves  and  with  each 
other.  The  Merry  Wives  stands  alone.  In  The  Merchant  of  Venice  and 
Measure  for  Measure  early  and  late  work  are  pretty  clearly  mingled. 

2  Leontes  opening  his  free  arms  and  weeping 
His  welcome  forth. 

3  ....      bold  oxlips  and 
The  crown-imperial. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  37 

free  redundance  and  overlapping  combined  :  perhaps  one 
made  very  much  earlier  than  is  usually  thought,  and  kept 
back.  Nor  would  this  lack  support  in  some  non-prosodic 
aspects  of  the  play.1 

Most  of  the  English  "  Histories "  come  into  Meres's  The  other 
list,  and  have  thus  been  discussed,  as  well  as  Henry  VL,  H^ftories. 
which  is  not  there.  Henry  V. — resting,  as  it  does,  in  Henry  V. 
part  on  old  work,  but  in  its  most  remarkable  passages 
pure  Shakespeare — is  prosodically  of  a  late,  but  not 
the  very  latest  portion  of  the  first  stage.  The  single- 
verse  mould  is  still,  so  to  speak,  the  handiest  that  the 
author  finds  to  pour  his  verse  into  ;  and  he  uses  hardly 
any  other  in  the  set  scenes  of  the  First  and  Second  Acts 
respecting  the  claim  to  the  French  crown  and  the  Scroop 
conspiracy,  the  chorus-prologues,  etc.  But  he  passes 
into  the  fused  form  as  before,  when  passion  rather  than 
pomp  requires  expression  :  as  in  the  great  soliloquy 
"  Upon  the  King."  Indeed,  and  for  obvious  reasons, 
Shakespeare's  soliloquies,  as  they  are  among  his  most 
characteristic  passages  in  other  respects,  are  also  of  the 
first  importance  as  prosodic  "  places."  The  bold  picture 

1  A  longer  specimen  should,  perhaps,  be  given,  as  the  prosodic  character 
of  the  play  is  peculiar  : — 

Flo.  So  call  it :  but  it  does  fulfil  my  vow  ; 
I  needs  must  think  it  honesty.      Camillo, 
Not  for  Bohemia,  nor  the  pomp  that  may 
Be  thereat  glean'd,  for  all  the  sun  sees  or 
The  close  earth  wombs  or  the  profound  seas  hide 
In  unknown  fathoms,  will  I  break  my  oath    ; 
To  this  my  fair  beloved  :  therefore,  I  pray  you, 
As  you  have  ever  been  my  father's  honour'd  friend, 
When  he  shall  miss  me, — as,  in  faith,  I  mean  not 
To  see  him  any  more, — cast  your  good  counsels 
Upon  his  passion  :  let  myself  and  fortune 
Tug  for  the  time  to  come.     This  you  may  know 
And  so  deliver,  I  am  put  to  sea 
With  her  whom  here  I  cannot  hold  on  shore ; 
And  most  opportune  to  our  need  I  have 
A  vessel  rides  fast  by,  but  not  prepared 
For  this  design.     What  course  I  mean  to  hold 
Shall  nothing  benefit  your  knowledge,  nor 
Concern  me  the  reporting. 

This  connects  itself,  rather  remarkably,  with  the  AlFs  Well  that  Ends  Well 
passages  cited  above. 


38  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

of  the  wretchedness  of  the  English  army  by  Grandpr£ — 
a  thing  resembling  Victor  Hugo's  sketches  with  pen-ends 
— is  half-and-half,  as  is  also  the  hackneyed  (if  it  could  be 
hackneyed)  address  to  "  my  cousin  Westmoreland  "  ;  while 
in  Burgundy's  oration  towards  the  close,  the  older  model 
has  the  speech  pretty  much  to  itself.  The  Sonnet- 
Epilogue  by  the  Chorus  is  noteworthy,  and  reminds  us 
of  the  Sonnet-Prologues  to  the  first  two  acts  of  Romeo  and 
Juliet. 

Henry  via.  As  for  Henry  VIII.,  the  suspicions  of  at  least  col- 
laboration therein  are  well  known.  A  good  deal  of  it 
must  be  Shakespeare's  ;  the  fall *  of  Wolsey  and  the  death 
of  Katharine  are  his  in  thought,  in  diction,  and  in  prosody, 
as  surely  as  if  we  had  his  autograph  assertion  of  the  fact, 
signed  and  witnessed  by  Fletcher  and  Ben  Jonson,  and 
the  witnesses'  signatures  attested  by  a  succession  of 
endorsements  for  each  generation  to  the  present  day. 
The  Prologue  has,  indeed,  no  such  ring,  and  this  might 
have  been  added  ;  but  I  do  not  see  much  else  that  fails 
to  come  up  to  the  test.  The  whole  play,  however,  is  well 
known  to  be  as  full  of  hendecasyllables  as  one  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher's  own,  and  the  overlapping  even 
exceeds  the  redundancy.  It  is  therefore  impossible  that 
it  should  not  be  late. 

Troilus  and  ^  '1S  equally  impossible,  to  pass  to  the  classical  plays, 
Cressida.  that  Troilus  and  Cressida,  in  part  at  least,  should  not  be 
early ;  and  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  fact  of  Meres 
not  mentioning  a  play  is  not  final.  But  it  belongs  to  the 
class  in  which,  though  the  bullet-mould  verse  (as  it  has  been 
called)  is  still  predominant,  there  are  already  redundant 
endings,  full  pauses  in  the  middle  of  lines,  and  even  some 
direct  enjambment  between  line  and  line.  The  piece 
also,  as  is  well  known,  is  full  of  the  long  set  tirades — 
almost  soliloquies — couched  in  very  rhetorical,  and  even 
bombastic  language,  which  are  characteristic  of  the 

1  Even  the  "  farewell,"  which  seems  to  some  so  eminently  Fletcherian, 
is  to  me,  after  recent  and  copious  re-readings  of  "  B.  and  F.,"  Fletcher 
plus  some  more  potent  spirit  prosodically  as  otherwise,  if  it  is  Fletcher  at 
all.  The  further  discussion  of  this  seems  to  me  rather  for  editors  of  the  two 
dramatists. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  39 

University  Wits.  And  something  of  this  comes  in  the 
modernest  touch  of  the  whole,  the  fine 

Time  hath,  my  lord,  a  wallet  at  his  back, 

of  Ulysses,  which  may  stand  as  a  capital  specimen  of 
Shakespeare's  blank  verse  just  before  it  had  attained  its 
highest  point  of  ease,  without  ceasing  in  the  least  to  be 
well  girt ;  while  nearly  as  much  may  be  said  of  Troilus's 
passionate  repudiation  of  the  identity  of  "  Diomed's 
Cressida"  with  his  own. 

But  the  other  Greek  tragedy — to  violate  the  folio 
order  a  little,  here  as  elsewhere,  for  convenience'  sake — 
though  somewhat  of  a  puzzle  in  many  ways,  is  certainly 
of  a  later  date  than  Troilus  prosodically.  The  great 
prosodic  note  of  Timon  is  that  pause  which  shocked  Guest1 
so  irreconcilably,  and  which  shows  the  final  mastery  Q{  Athens. 
the  whole  secret — 

.      Dead 
Is  noble  Timon. 

But  this,  though  a  special  grace,  a  single  flower  or 
feather  in  the  cap,  is  not  in  any  discordance  with  the 
general  prosodic  character  of  the  garment.  From  the 
first  conversation  of  Painter  and  Poet  to  the  funeral  speech 
of  Alcibiades,  in  which  the  tolling-bell  pause  above  quoted 
occurs,  the  blank  verse  is  of  the  thoroughly  fused,  matured, 
accomplished  type,  whether  in  jointed  or  in  single  speech. 
There  is  some  but  not  much  redundance  and  enjambment, 
rather,  it  would  seem,  for  convenience  than  deliberately 
used. 

The  three  Roman  plays,  on  the  other  hand,  exhibit, 
probably  because  they  were  actually  written  in  their  proper 
chronological  sequence,2  a  steady  rise  in  prosodic  mastery. 

1  English  Rhythms,  ed.   Skeat,  p.    153.      "Opposed  to  every  principle 
of  accentual  rhythm,"  he  says,  and  perhaps  he  is  right.      But  in  that  case 
the  principles  of  accentual  rhythm  are  obviously  themselves  opposed  to  the 
best  English  poetry. 

2  It  is  usual  to  regard  Julius  Citsar  as  the  earliest  by  some  seven  years, 
but  the  evidence  for  its  date  is  weak,  and  that  for  the  late  dates  of  the  others 
weaker.      On  the  other  hand,  the  "cragginess"  of  Coriolanus  in  parts  seems 
to  me  much  more  like  a  partial  and  probable  break-up  of  the  rock-wall  of 
Titus  than  an  experiment  later  than  the  smoothness  of  Julius  C&sar. 


THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


BOOK  V 


Antony  and 
Cleopatra. 


Corioianus.  In  Coriolanus  we  are  already  far  from  the  at  least  pseudo- 
Roman  Titus  Andronicus\  but  Antony  and  Cleopatra  shows 
the  blank  verse  of  Shakespeare  at  its  absolute  zenith. 
"  My  name  is  Caius  Marcius,"  "  All  places  yield  to  him," 
and  the  great  supplication-rebukes  of  Volumnia  are  so 
good  that,  considering  them  singly,  a  critic  might  say  they 
could  not  be  better.  If  a  suspicion  of  want  of  ease,  of 
absence  of  variety,  of  the  declamatory  occurs  to  us,  it  is 
only  on  the  "  rascally,  comparative  "  principle,  because  the 

Julius  Casar.  same  writer  has  given  us  things  more  perfect.  In  Julius 
Ccesar  variety  itself,  colour,  flexibility,  a  dozen  other 
qualities  of  attraction  reinforce  and  complicate  the  Corio- 
lanian  dignity.  The  appeal  of  Marullus,  partisan  as  it 
is,  sets  the  note,  or  one  of  the  numerous  notes,  of  brilliant 
phrase  married  to  concerted  verse ;  and  all  the  great 
passages,  that  literally  every  schoolboy  knows,  carry  it  on 
to  the  end.  It  might  seem  impossible  to  improve  on 
this;  but  I  sincerely  think  that  Antony  and  Cleopatra 
does  show  an  improvement,  and  the  last  possible.  The 
very  opening  speech,  poetical  enough,  but,  as  was  fitting, 
somewhat  rhetorically  poetical  in  substance,  displays  such 
cunning  and  science  of  pause  and  line-weighting  that  it 
is  perhaps  worth  taking  as  the  specimen  thereof.1  The 
poet  plays  on  the  ten  lines  as  if  they  were  the  strings, 
separate  but  in  harmony,  of  a  ten-stringed  lyre.  There 
is  hardly  any  prose — none,  in  fact,  save  in  the  one  purely 

1  Nay,  1 1  but  this  dotage  of  our  general's 
O'erflows  the  measure  :  1 1  those  his  goodly  eyes, 
That  o'er  the  files  |  and  musters  of  the  war 
Have  glowed  like  plated  Mars,  1 1  now  bend,  |  now  turn, 
The  office  and  devotion  of  their  view 
Upon  a  tawny  front :  ||  his  captain's  heart, 
Which  |  in  the  scuffles  of  great  fights  |  hath  burst 
The  buckles  on  his  breast,  1 1  rene[a]g[u]es  all  temper, 
And  is  become  |  the  bellows  and  the  fan 
To  cool  a  gipsy's  lust. 

(Here  the  double  division  marks  indicate  stronger,  and  the  single  lighter, 
pauses — not,  as  usually  in  the  latter  case,  feet. )  Attention  may  also  be 
called  to  the  set  speeches  of  Octavius  on  different  occasions.  They  are 
usually  in  very  artful  verse,  strongly  but  variously  broken  by  middle  pauses  ; 
extremely  effective,  but  with  the  art  obviously  emphasised  to  suit  the 
character.  Cf.  especially  the  opening  of  III.  vi.  and  the  speeches  to 
Octavia  later. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  41 


comic  passage, — but  Shakespeare  moulds  his  blank  verse 
so  impeccably  that  it  never  sounds  unnatural  in  doing 
prose  office.  And  when  it  does  its  own,  it  is  indeed  far 
above  singing.  Rhyme  is  great  and  good  ;  no  one  who 
has  done  me  the  honour  to  read  my  first  volume  will 
doubt  my  allegiance  to  it.  Stanza  is  good  ;  I  may  say 
the  same  of  that.  But  no  rhyme,  no  stanza,  could  have 
given  us  such  a  piece  of  pure  and  absolute  poetry — that  is 
to  say,  of  language  in  metrical  form — as 

Peace !  Peace ! 

Dost  thou  not  see  my  baby  at  my  breast, 
That  sucks  the  nurse  asleep  ? 

The  serpent  of  old  Nile  dies  true  to  herself  in  the 
marvellous  winding  of  this  dying  fall,  which,  while  it  is 
one  of  the  greatest  things  in  poetry,  is  an  absolute  pattern, 
a  school-model  and  sampler  of  all  but  the  whole  secret  of 
blank-verse  fashion  in  pause,  and  cadence,  and  composition. 

The  first  of  the  four  great  romantic  tragedies,  as  it  is  The  Four 
one  of  the  best  known  both  to  audiences  and  readers,  so  tragedies 
it  is  one  of  the  fullest  of  puzzles,  not  least  prosodically, 
to  critics.  Nowhere  has  Shakespeare  shown  either  the 
infinite  resources  of  blank  verse,  or  his  own  infinite 
command  l  of  them,  more  completely  and  victoriously  than 
in  Macbeth.  Not  only  do  all  the  great  single  speeches —  Macbeth. 
from  Lady  Macbeth's  "  The  raven  himself  is  hoarse "  to 
that  ineffable  lament  of  her  husband's  for  her,  which  some 
equally  but  differently  ineffable  persons  regard  as  a 
callous  put-by,  and  Siward's  epitaph  on  his  son — exhibit 
these  two  things  as  he  only  could  exhibit  or  has  exhibited 
them ;  but  the  jointed  work  of,  say,  the  banquet  scene,  is  not 
inferior.  Still,  mainly  but  not  merely  in  the  singular 
overture,  there  are  passages  of  a  far  older  and  less  accom- 
plished type.  In  the  curious  bombast  of  the  Sergeant, 
in  Ross's  first  entrance,  and  (which,  I  think,  has  been  less 
noticed)  almost  everywhere  where  the  Thanes  appear,  we 
have,  if  not  full,  yet  distinct,  examples  of  the  gasp-line, 
unmodulated  and  unsymphonised,  the  line  weighted  with 

1  For  more  on  this  command  and  these  resources,  see  the  general  remarks 
which  will  follow  this  detailed  comment. 


42  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

fixed  plummets  or  pledgets  of  lead,  and  not  with  coursing 
quicksilver.  Half-a-dozen  different  conclusions  might  be 
drawn  from  these  facts  as  to  the  origin,  the  date,  and 
other  things  which  concern  a  different  method  of  inquiry 
from  ours.  It  is  enough  for  us  to  point  out  that  they  exist. 
Hamlet.  The  "  points  in  Hamlet's  soul  "  are  a  byword  ;  and 
the  points  which  make  Hamlet  its  author's  capital  play 
are  scarcely  less  numerous,  or  less  disputable.  On  one 
point  concerning  it,  however,  one  may  pronounce  with 
some  positiveness.  The  play,  in  its  recognised  form,  is 
the  work  of  a  man  for  whom  blank  verse  has  no  further 
secrets,  who  has  every  trick  of  it  literally  at  his  finger's 
ends  ;  and  who,  moreover,  is  not  yet  under  the  influence 
of  any  mannerism  which  impairs  the  universality  of  his 
handling  of  the  medium.  Except  that  he  is  not  so 
prodigal  of  the  trisyllabic  foot  as  he  might  be,  and,  as 
sometimes  elsewhere,  restricts  it  mainly  to  that  interesting 
but  tell-tale  use  at  the  caesura  on  which  we  speak  pres- 
ently, there  is  hardly  a  single  device  that  he  does  not 
employ  copiously  ;  and  he  employs  them  all  with  a  very 
minimum  of  effort.  In  particular,  he  has  now  so  com- 
pletely got  under  his  command  the  jointed  blank  verse  of 
conversation,  that  he  really  has  no  need  of  prose.  He 
uses  it,  of  course  ;  Hamlet  is  hardly  a  greater  place  for 
anything  Shakespearian  than  for  the  Shakespearian  prose  ; 
but  he  need  not  have  used  it.  The  First  Act  has  many 
passages  where  prose  would  do  just  as  well  as  verse,  but 
where  the  actual  easy  jointed  verse  does  just  as  well  as 
prose.  He  can  still,  when  he  chooses  and  thinks  it 
appropriate,  use  the  old  staccato  form.1  The  King's 
opening  harangue  in  Act  I.  Sc.  ii.  is  mainly  in  this,  and 
it  recurs  at  intervals  up  to  Horatio's  closing  observations. 
But  it  is  quite  evidently  not  an  obsession  from  which  the 
writer  with  difficulty  escapes,  or  an  object  at  which  he 
dutifully  aims  ;  it  is  something  that  he  does  because  he 
likes  and  chooses  to  do  it.  Elsewhere,  in  Hamlet's  great 
soliloquies,  and  indeed  constantly,  he  chooses  to  do  some- 
thing quite  different — he  has  the  paragraph  style  as 
1  As,  for  instance,  in  the  inset  play  with  obvious  reason. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  43 

completely  at  command  as  the  staccato  or  the  mosaic,  and 
uses  it  at  his  pleasure,  and  for  ours. 

Even  these  things,  however,  do  not  show  the  terms  of 
absolute  and  intimate  familiarity  on  which  the  medium 
and  the  craftsman  now  are,  so  well  as  another.  The 
variation  of  the  pause,  the  breaking  of  the  line,  the  use 
of  the  redundant  syllable  both  at  end  and  caesura,  and 
the  trisyllabic  foot  improved  from  this  latter,  are  all  great 
things  in  the  perfecting  of  the  decasyllabic.  But,  to 
paradox  it  a  little,  the  greatest  evidence  of  the  triumph  of 
this  decasyllabic  is  to  be  found  in  the  lines  which  are  not 
decasyllabic  ;  in  those  which  exceed  and  become  Alexan- 
drines, more  or  less  regular,  of  which  there  are  not  a  few  ; 
and  in  the  fragments,  falling  short  of  decasyllabic  length, 
of  which  there  are  many.1  For  these  are  evidently  not 
like  the  excessive  or  defective  lines  in  fifteenth  and  even 
mid- sixteenth-century  verse — blundering  attempts  to  be 
regular ;  but  quite  deliberate  indulgences  in  excess  or 
defect  over  or  under  a  regular  norm  which  is  so  pervading, 
so  thoroughly  marked,  that  it  carries  them  off  on  its  wings. 
In  the  whole  First  Act  of  Hamlet  (I  have  just  read  it 
through  for  the  purpose,  scanning  every  line)  there  is 
not  a  single  unmetrical  verse  or  fragment  of  verse,  nor 
any  licence  unsanctioned  by  the  general  principles  of 
which  we  are  watching  the  evolution  in  this  treatise,  except 
that  (certainly  sanctionable  by  them)  of  using  lines  longer 
or  shorter  than  the  norm  when  the  poet  chooses  to  do  so. 
To  read  Hamlet,  and  think  of  Titus  Andronicus  or  Love's 
Labour's  Lost,  is  a  most  quaint  and  pleasing  experience; 
to  read  Hamlet  and  then  one  of  Marlowe's  plays,  remember- 
ing that  the  poets  were  of  the  same  age,  that  they  were 
not  so  very  unequally  matched  in  quality,  whatever  may 
be  the  case  with  quantity,  of  genius,  and  that  scarcely 
more  than  fifteen  years  can  by  any  possibility  have  elapsed 
between  the  pieces,  may  make  one  simply  marvel. 

1  This  is  a  point  of  importance,  and  may  be  misunderstood  by  those  who 
have  not  accustomed  themselves  to  note  the  difference  between  poetical  and 
prosodic  rhythm.  What  I  mean  is  that  the  incomplete  lines,  of  which  there 
are  many,  even  in  I.  i. ,  all  scan  regularly  as  far  as  they  go,  like  those  found  here 
and  there  in  Virgil. 


44  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

King  Lear.  There  are  some  peculiarities  in  the  blank  verse  of 
King  Lear.  Instead  of  the  set  speeches  in  the  earlier 
part  of  the  play  showing — as  we  have  seen  is  sometimes 
the  case,  even  in  pieces  pretty  late  in  date  and  pretty  far 
advanced  in  accomplishment  —  a  tendency  towards  the 
stiffened  model,  the  decasyllabics  of  Lear's  ill-judged  and 
ill-fated  bid  for  his  daughters'  hypocrisy  are  of  the  very 
finest  type.  They  run  into  each  other  less  than  the 
probably  still  later  model  of  The  Winter's  Tale,  and 
Cymbeline,  and  The  Tempest ;  but  they  are  even  fuller  of 
trisyllabic  feet,  and  the  lines  extend  not  merely  to  the 
Alexandrine  but  to  the  fourteener.1  The  speeches,  evidently 
conned  beforehand,  of  Goneril  and  Regan,  lack  this  luxuri- 
ance, and  Lear's  rage  at  Cordelia's  fractiousness  (one  fears  it 
must  be  called  so,  and  it  supplies  in  her  case  the  apapria 
of  the  play)  acts  as  a  kind  of  styptic  to  it.  But  it  recurs 
in  him  and  in  others,  though  not  in  all,  and  not  always 
in  those  who  use  it.  It  is  the  properest  of  all  possible 
media  for  the  splendid  central  scenes,  and  especially  for 
that  more  than  ^Eschylean  opening  which  the  late 
Professor  Bain,2  though  acknowledging  it  to  be  one  of 
the  loftiest  flights  of  Shakespeare's  sublimity,  thought 
''wanting  in  dignity,"  "  improperly  arranged"  ("hurricane," 
it  seems,  ought  to  have  preceded  "  cataract  "),  "  powerful 
but  extravagant,"  "  containing  epithets  not  specially  appli- 
cable," and  "  barely  redeemed  from  feebleness."  Well  as 
it  is  known,  we  must  give  this  so  loftily  feeble  piece — 

Blow,  winds,  and  crack  your  cheeks  !  rage  !  blow  ! 

You  cataracts  and  hurricanoes,  spout 

Till  you  have  drench'd  our  steeples,  drown'd  the  cocks ! 

You  sulphurous  and  thought-executing  fires, 

Vaunt-couriers  to  oak-cleaving  thunderbolts, 

Singe  my  white  head  !     And  thou,  all-shaking  thunder, 

Smite  flat  the  thick  rotundity  o'  the  world  ! 

Crack  nature's  moulds,  all  germens  spill  at  once, 

That  make  ingrateful  man  ! 

Here  the  monosyllabic  feet  in  "  rage  "  and  "  blow,"  the 
trisyllabic  (nearly  if  not  quite  tribrachs)  at  "sul|phurous 

1  May  be  prevented  now.      The  princes,  France  and  Burgundy. 
2  Rhetoric  and  Composition,  i.  105.    . 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  45 

and,"  and  "  vaunt  cou  riers  to  "  and  "  rotun  dity  o'  I  the 
world  " — are  the  clous  or  the  hinges  of  the  metrical  com- 
position. It  is  not  for  nothing  that  the  equally  famous 
description  of  the  cliff  is  in  regular,  cunningly  jointed,  but 
swiftly  moving  verse,  a  sort  of  under-the-breath  of  appre- 
hension, as  if  boisterous  speaking  might  bring  danger  ; 
nor  that  the  broken  verse  (really  "  broken ")  of  Lear's 
invective  on  women  resolves  itself  at  last  into  sheer  prose  ; 
nor  that  Edmund  supplies  a  hardly  less  perfect  example 
in  little  than  Cleopatra's,  with — 

Thou  hast  spoken  right :  'tis  true     . 

The  wheel  has  come  full  circle  :   I  am  here  ; 

nor  that  Lear's  last  moan,  before  his  agony  chokes  him, 
is  represented  by  the  incomparable  audacity  and  the  more 
incomparable  success  of  the  five -times -repeated  trochee 
"  Never  ! "  Once  more  there  is  no  spirit  from  the  infinite 
deep  of  prosodic  possibility  that  the  poet  cannot  call,  and 
none  that  dare  disobey  the  calling. 

The  agony  in  Othello  is  not  finally  abated,  because  otheiio. 
Desdemona  is  a  more  entirely  innocent  victim  than  Cordelia, 
and  the  apapria  of  the  Moor  is  far  more  pardonable  than 
that  of  Lear.  But  the  matter  of  the  play  is  much  more 
varied  ;  and  whereas,  in  Lear,  the  actual  tragedy  begins 
almost  at  once,  and  is  hardly  medicable,  the  author  of 
Much  Ado  about  Nothing  would  not  have  found  it  a  very 
difficult  matter  to  turn  Othello  into  a  tragi-comedy,  though 
the  present  phase  of  dramatic  taste  would  of  course  have 
been  shocked  at  this.  Therefore  the  play  requires  greater 
variety  of  medium  also,  and  has  it.  At  this  time,  more- 
over, Shakespeare  was  evidently  expert  in,  and  fond  of, 
the  very  freest  and  at  the  same  time  the  very  purest  form 
of  his  verse.  I  ago  is,  in  fact,  the  great  master  of  it. 
Few  people  have  ever  denied  "  mine  ancient "  brains,  and 
some  have  thought  that,  if  he  had  not  been  such  a  villain, 
he  might  have  been  a  very  good  fellow.  He  is  certainly 
both  good  and  great  at  verse.  His  two  chief  opening 
speeches  are  actually  the  text  and  locus  for  this  kind  of  it, 
as  well  as  for  demonstrating  the  extraordinary  and  hardly 


46  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

comprehensible  error  of  those  who  will  not  have  "  feet " 
in  Shakespearian,  or  in  any,  scansion.  The  excursions 
outwards  and  the  withdrawals  inward  from  the  norm 
are  almost  infinite  ;  but  they  are  animated  and  regulated 
by  the  presence  of  that  norm  in  foot  and  verse  alike. 
The  extreme  freedom  of  the  type  is  appropriately  modified 
in  the  interview  with  Brabantio,  and  in  what  we  may  call 
the  "  Court- of- Honour"  scene,  but  it  subsists  to  some 
extent  throughout.  Some  of  the  characters — Montano 
and  the  Two  Gentlemen,  for  instance — make  a  little 
return  to  the  "  bumbasted  out "  blank  verse  ;  while  lago 
in  his  soliloquies  is  rather  more  regular  than  Hamlet^ 
precisely  because  he  is  less  natural.  But  Desdemona's 
perfect  naturalness  makes  her  almost  as  excursive  as  her 
great  enemy  in  his  virtuoso  moods.  And  all — lago  him- 
self in  the  fiend's  aside  "  not  poppy  nor  mandragora," 
Othello  in  his  farewell  to  peace  of  mind,  Desdemona  in 
her  sorrow  at  his  change,  and  still  more  and  most  of  all 
the  Moor  in  his  agony  of  remorse — can  employ  the  sedater, 
but  perfectly  motioned  and  well-breathed  model  to  per- 
fection. Yet  in  that  other  of  the  apices  of  the  impregnable 
and  only  from  afar  beholdable  places  of  poetry  with 
which  the  play  closes,  there  is  a  sort  of  return  to  the 
elastic  verse.  Othello  hurries  over  or  lengthens  out — 

Nor  set  down  aught  |  in  malice  :  |  then  must  you  speak, 
and 

Richer  |  than  all  |  his  tribe ;  |  of  one  |  whose  sub|dued  eyes. 

But  there  is  no  irregular  throb  in  the  steady  pulse  and 
purpose  of  the  period  from  "  Set  you  down  this,"  to 
"  And  smote  him  "  ;  though  the  sob  of  the  trisyllable  may 
return  in  the  final 

I  kissed  |  thee  ere  |  I  killed  |  thee  :  no  way  |  but  this. 

Cymbeiine.        Cymbeline — a  play  of  which  more  foolish  people  have 
said  more  foolish  things  *  perhaps  than  even  of  any  other 

1  I  think  the  palm  is  perhaps  due  to  a  mysterious  person  at  Calcutta  who, 
as  I  learn  from  Mr.  Bertram  Dobell's  Catalogue  of  Privately  Printed  Books, 
requested  to  be  informed,  in  the  year  1841,  "  What  can  be  more  drivelling  than 
the  '  Dirge  on  Fidele ' — a  subject  of  which  Collins  has  shown  the  poetical 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  47 

play  of  Shakespeare  (if  that  be  possible) — does  not  tax 
the  instrument  to  the  superhuman  extent  of  Othello.  And 
the  late  type  of  verse — rather  loose  than  merely  free — 
which  it  shares  with  some  others,  suits  well  enough,  and 
breaks  into  prose  quite  naturally  and  easily  when  the 
poet  feels  inclined  for  even  more  of  "  dressing-gown-and- 
slippers  "  liberty.  But  he  never  forgets  civility  ;  and  is 
always  duly  garbed  for  a  ceremonious  occasion.  lachimo 
resembles  his  spiritual  and  perhaps  natural  clansman — 
certainly  compatriot — lago,  in  being  able  to  run  the 
gamut  of  blank  verse  perfectly  ;  Imogen's  is  as  gracious 
as  her  nature  ;  the  Queen's  has  a  treacherous  stateliness  ; 
the  most  orderly  pattern  is  perhaps  found  in  the  scene 
with  the  banished  family ;  the  most  powerful  in  that 
which  follows  between  Imogen  and  Pisanio ;  while  the 
sweetest  is  Guiderius'  companion  flower-piece  to  Perdita's 
in  the  play  which  is  itself  the  pendant  to  Cymbeline 
prosodically.  But  the  most  accomplished  is  lachimo's  at  the 
accomplishment  of  his  treason  ;  and  this  is  not  of  the 
very  loosest  model. 

Nor  shall  we  omit  Pericles,  of  the  authorship  of  which  Pericles. 
(at  least  as  far  as  concerns  the  greater  part  of  it)  I  have 
never  had  the  slightest  doubt.  But  it  was  evidently  a 
derelict  in  some  way.  Not  merely  the  extremely  decousu 
character  of  the  plot,  and  the  absence  of  any  distinct 
character-drawing,  but  the  importance  and  peculiarity  of 
the  chorus,  show  earliness  ;  and  so  does  the  blank  verse, 
though  this  is  not  exactly  of  the  earliest  The  first 


capabilities  ? "  Now  certainly  Collins,  at  his  best,  is  a  poet  whom  it  is  not 
absurd  to  mention  in  the  same  sentence  with  Shakespeare,  different  though  the 
magnitude  of  their  stars  may  be.  But  the  "drivel"  of 

Fear  no  more  the  heat  o'  the  sun 
Nor  the  furious  winter's  rages, 

and  the  "poetry"  of 

To  fair  Fidele's  grassy  tomb 

Soft  maids  and  village  hinds  shall  come 

(which  is  hardly  at  the  best  eighteenth  century  level  in  its  gradus  epithets  and 
mawkish  sweetness),  is  a  very  comfortable  comparison.  It  would  be  interest- 
ing to  know  the  gentleman's  name,  and  whether  he  left  a  family.  His 
spiritual  descendants  are  certainly  still  with  us. 


48  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

speeches,  especially  the  soliloquies,  of  Pericles  himself  are 
distinctly  but  not  exclusively  stopped  ;  and  there  is 
plenty  of  redundance  in  them.  So  also  is  it  with  Cleon's 
in  the  famine.  But  when  the  storm  comes,  the  Prince, 
both  in  his  opening  and  in  the  beautiful 

A  terrible  childbed  hast  thou  had,  my  dear, 

adopts  a  very  much  freer  model — indeed,  one  almost  as 
free  as  that  of  the  great  Quadrilateral.  There  is,  how- 
ever, little  new  for  us  here,  though  we  must  return  to 
the  important  octosyllables. 

General  In  the  foregoing  survey  of  Shakespeare's  plays  I  have 

considerations.  g{ven  some  general  idea  of  the  way  in  which  the  operation 
of  the  various  agencies  shows  itself,  with  (as  far  as  possible) 
the  order  of  their  succession.  Really,  though  chrono- 
logical illustration  is  interesting  and  corroborative,  it  is 
in  a  way  superfluous,  because  we  can  see  without  it  how 
the  employment  of  them  would  grow  on  the  hands  of 
such  an  artist.  Of  deliberate  experimenting  with  any  or 
all  of  them  there  would  probably  not  be  very  much  ;  the 
man  who  wrote  "  Rebellion  lay  in  his  way,  and  he  found 
it,"  has  dispensed  us  from  any  such  vain  imagination. 
These  things  lay  in  his  way  ;  and  he  found  them,  and 
made  the  most  of  them.  That  "  most "  also  has  been 
illustrated  freely.  But  it  is  perhaps  desirable  to  give  it 
an  account  of  something  the  same  kind  as  that  which  has 
been  given  to  the  style  which  was  its  matrix  and  crude 
form. 

The  completed  Shakespearian  blank  verse,  as  we 
see  it  maturing  in  the  later  early,  and  middle  plays,  and 
matured  in  the  four  great  tragedies  and  in  Antony  and 
Cleopatra,  preserves  the  iambic  decasyllabic  as  norm 
inviolably ;  never  instals  any  other,  and  makes  everything 
that  it  admits  hold  of  that.  But  the  strict  minimum  is 
infinitely  varied,  and,  even  when  kept,  is  entirely  stripped 
of  its  monotonous  and  stable  character,  and  made  to 
understand  that  it  must  be  Protean  in  itself,  and  ready 
to  enter  into  infinite  combinations  with  its  neighbours. 
The  great  agency  in  this,  beyond  all  doubt,  is  the 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  49 

manipulation  of  the  pause.  Not  that  Shakespeare  is,  as 
some  have  vainly  thought,  to  be  scanned  by  "  staves  " — 
staves  "  knapped,"  as  the  good  old  Biblical  word  has  it, 
almost  as  bluntly  as  the  old  alliterative  verses  themselves. 
The  futility  of  this  notion  is  shown,  in  a  way  which  makes 
it  wonderful  that  it  should  ever  have  been  entertained  by- 
anybody,  in  the  fact  that  a  very  large  proportion  of 
Shakespeare's  lines  have  no  real  pause  at  all,  are  "  staves  " 
of  themselves,  and  hardly  even  that,  so  unbroken  is  the 
rhythmical  current  of  the  adjacent  lines  from  and  into 
them.  This  doing  away  with  middle-  and  end -pause 
alike  is  at  least  as  important  as  the  variation  of  the 
middle,  and,  in  fact,  is  but  an  extension  of  it. 

The  normal  blank-verse  line  of  the  origins,  as  Shake- 
speare took  it  over  from  Surrey,  Sackville,  and  even  the 
Wits,  was  a  strict  "  decasyllabon  "  of  five  iambics,  with  a 
caesura  somewhat  carefully  observed  about  the  middle, 
and  self-inclosed  in  a  manner  not  easy  to  make  plain  by 
individual  examples,  or  by  any  process  of  overt  analysis, 
but  sensible  to  any  ear  of  the  slightest  delicacy  when  a 
few  specimens  have  been  read.  It  sometimes  admitted  a 
sort  of  redundance  or  "  weak  ending,"  not  merely  in 
words  which  were  then  really  monosyllables,  like  "  heaven," 
but  in  those  which  were  trochaic-tipped  with  a  very  short 
final  syllable,  like  "  glory."  This  licence,  however,  did 
not  in  the  least  affect  its  general  structure.  It  by  no 
means  always  concluded  with  even  a  comma  (though  it 
mostly  did  do  so)  ;  but  the  grammatical  running  on  did 
not  in  the  least  interfere  with  the  metrical  snapping  off. 
It  tolerated  pretty  strong  stops  in  the  middle  of  the  line, 
but  these  also  (so  much  stronger  was  the  obsession  of 
line-integrity)  did  not  interfere  with  the  sunk  ditch  of  the 
line- end.  Thus,  even  when,  as  in  the  great  passages 
of  Peele  and  Marlowe,  the  unity  of  thought  and  imagina- 
tion made  the  paragraph  quite  poetically  distinct,  this 
paragraph  was  never  a  real  verse -period  of  the  larger 
kind  ;  there  was  no  composition  in  the  purely  rhythmical 
and  metrical  conception  of  the  verse.  To  put  the  thing 
extremely — extravagantly,  some  would  say — the  delivery 
VOL.  II  E 


5o  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

of  this  paragraph  to  a  person  who  did  not  understand 
the  language  would  have  conveyed  to  him  the  idea  of 
some  dozen  or  sixteen  verses,  individually  perhaps 
melodious,  but  not  regimented,  not  worked  into  any  kind 
of  symphony.  This  sort  of  blank  verse  we  find  in  all  the 
writers  named  above  exclusively,  with  the  exceptions 
(and  others,  of  course),  also  noted  above,  in  Marlowe  and 
his  mates,  when  the  rough  strife  of  poetry  bursts  its  way 
through  the  iron  gates  of  metre.  We  find  it  also  in 
Titus  Andronicus,  in  the  Comedy  of  Errors,  in  Love's 
Labour's  Losty  in  the  early  rehandled  "  Histories,"  and 
elsewhere  in  Shakespeare  himself. 

But,  as  partly  noted,  there  are  certain  features  even 
in  this  rigid  and  early  model  which  are  at  war  with  the 
self-contained  single  line  and  the  merely  cumulative  batch 
of  lines.  They  may  be  kept  under  as  long  as  the  poet's 
chief  aim  is  to  secure  his  decasyllabon,  to  keep  it  from 
doggerel  on  the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other,  to  make  it 
independent  of  the  warning  bell  of  rhyme  at  the  end. 
But  when  practice,  in  himself  to  speak  and  in  his  readers 
to  hear,  has  made  the  blank  decasyllabic  effect  familiar — 
when  it  need  not  be  strictly  uniform  in  order  to  obtain 
recognition — these  features  assert  themselves.  The  first 
of  these  probably,  and  the  most  insidious,  but  also  the 
most  revolutionary,  is  the  redundant  syllable.  It  is  of 
an  ancient  house  ;  we  had  ourselves  fifteeners  before  we 
had  fourteeners,  and  in  all  prosodies  from  Greek  down- 
wards there  has  been  a  tendency  to  regard  the  last  place 
in  a  line  as  a  place  of  licence  and  liberty.  It  is  curiously 
unassuming  ;  in  words  (to  keep  the  same  examples)  not 
merely  like  "  heaven,"  but  like  "  glory,"  it  is  a  sort  of 
"  breath "  only,  something  that  you  do  not  count,  but 
just  smuggle  in  with  its  companion.  Yet,  as  we  shall 
see  presently,  it  is  a  very  Trojan  Horse  in  reality.  Then 
there  is  the  stop,  full  or  other,  in  the  middle  of  the  line. 
This  also  is  innocent-seeming.  What  is  it  but  a  mere 
grammatical  emphasising  of  the  caesura  itself,  recognised 
of  Gascoigne  and  all  good  people  long  before  the  first 
of  the  Wits  had  trodden  or  supplied  the  stage?  Next 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  51 

probably — but  it  need  hardly  be  said  that  I  stand  not 
upon  the  order — comes  the  intermixture  of  rhyme,  a  thing 
which  the  greatest  blank  verse  will  frown  upon,  but  which 
is  so  likely  as  a  relapse,  so  convenient  as  a  "  cue-tip,"  so 
pleasant  to  the  as  yet  unaccustomed  ear  of  the  ground- 
lings ;  and  which,  be  it  remembered,  almost  necessitates 
a  sort  of  junction  between  two  lines,  though  it  may  favour 
the  closing  of  the  couplets.  All  these  are  things  appar- 
ently compatible — certainly  found — with  the  stiffest  of 
the  drumming  decasyllabons,  yet  secret  solvents  of  their 
stiffness. 

Other  things,  still  not  ostensibly  revolutionary,  next 
suggest  themselves.  We  have  seen  in  the  last  volume, 
that  mediaeval  poets,  whether  through  inexpertness  or 
by  experiment,  and  fifteenth  -  century  poets  through 
clumsiness,  largely  curtailed  or  extended  the  normal 
length  of  the  line  ;  that  there  are  Alexandrines  even  in 
Chaucer,  while — a  point  to  which  the  Renaissance  was 
likely  to  pay  more  attention — there  are  undoubtedly 
incomplete  lines  in  Virgil.  Why  not  avail  oneself  of 
these  licences  ?  Even  Marlowe  had  done  so  now  and 
then.  Why  not  ?  But  if  you  do,  your  sacred  integer  of 
ten  syllables  is  rudely  touched.  Once  more,  again,  you 
have  recognised,  and  had  formally  recognised  for  you,1  the 
duty  of  making  a  sort  of  fold  or  crease  in  each  verse 
at  the  fourth,  fifth,  or  neighbouring  syllable.  It  is  in- 
convenient, as  well  as  monotonous  always  to  do  it  at  the 
same  place  ;  yet  when  you  begin  to  vary  that  place,  is 
not  the  structure  of  the  line  troubled,  though  beneficently 
so  ?  And  is  there  not  somehow  a  kind  of  rhythmic 
conspiracy  in  the  successive  lines  where  you  vary  it? 
Then,  too,  there  comes  the  power  of  words.  Important 
or  beautiful  words,  adjusted,  spaced,  accumulated,  give 
brilliancy,  splendour,  weight  to  the  line.  But  the  line  is 
so  short.  Why  cut  the  necklace  into  lengths  ?  Why 
not  make  the  stars  constellations  ? 

And,  lastly,  there  is  the  trisyllabic  foot. 

1  On  this  and  other  references  of  the  kind  see  the  chapter  on  "  Prosodists  " 
in  this  Book. 


52  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

I  trust  I  may  repeat  (after  the  not  of  course  unanimous 
but  fairly  general  acknowledgment  of  critics,  that  the  pre- 
ceding volume  has  made  something  of  a  case  for  it)  that  the 
trisyllabic  foot  is  ubiquitous  in  English  verse  from  1200  to 
1500,  and  that  nothing  but  the  reaction  from  the  anarchy 
of  doggerel  brought  about  later,  the  partial  and  only 
partial  reprobation  thereof.  But  there  is  no  need  to  have 
recourse  to  this,  though  from  the  historical  point  of  view 
it  cannot  be  omitted.  In  blank  verse,  and  especially  in 
dramatic  blank  verse — when  once  the  practitioner  has  got 
rid  of  his  fear  of  losing  the  guide-rope,  if  he  step  out  of 
the  strict  iamb — it  must,  in  English,  appear.  It  does 
appear ;  and  with  it  disappears  the  mere  rub-a-dub  of 
the  decasyllabon. 

The  pause.  In  arranging  the  pause — at  any  syllable  from  first  to 
ninth,  and  at  no  syllable  at  all,  not  even  tenth — he  is 
helped  infinitely  by  that  distribution  of  the  weight  of 
words,  rather  after  the  fashion  of  quicksilver  in  a  reed 
than  of  leaden  bracelets  fastened  at  intervals  round  a 
stick,  which  has  been  more  than  once  referred  to.  Nobody 
has  approached  Shakespeare — Tennyson  has  perhaps 
come  nearest,  for  Milton's  verse  is  too  uniformly  stately 
for  comparison — in  this  mastery  of  poetical  conjuring  with 
word  and  line,  a  mastery  of  which  he  had  more  than  a 
glimpse  as  early  as  Romeo  and  Juliet,  and  of  which  he  gave 
the  final  and  perfect  display  in  The  Tempest.  The  lines 
rise,  fall,  sweep,  wave,  dart  straight  forward,  are  arrested  in 
mid-air,  insinuate  themselves  in  serpentine  fashion  as  if  in 
sword-play  against  an  invisible  adversary. 

But  these  effects  of  weight,  lightness,  pungency, 
arresting  power,  and  so  forth,  are  at  least  partly  caused — 
are  certainly  assisted  immensely — by  two  other  things, 
the  redundant  ending  and  the  trisyllabic  foot.  The  first 
chiefly  gives  variety ;  the  second  variety  and  flexibility  as 
nothing  else  could  do  ;  while  variety  again  is  lent  by  the 
shortened  fragment-verses  and  the  elongated  Alexandrines 
and  fourteeners,  or  by  verses  with  several  trisyllabic  feet 
in  them.  How  these  various  devices  may  be  made  to 
subserve  particular  effects  of  meaning,  shades  of  passion, 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  53 

and  the  like,  need  not  be  much  dwelt  on.  This  is  a  form 
of  prosodic  study  which  has  always  commended  itself  to 
the  multitude  as  much  as,  perhaps  almost  more  than,  it 
should.  But  as  to  the  way  in  which  the  use  of  the 
trisyllabic  foot  grew,  I  have  a  theory  which  is  doubtless 
not  new  but  about  which  I  have  not  seen  much  written. 

It  has  been  observed  before,  that,  according  to  the  The  trisyllabic 
principles  of  this  book,  "extra-metrical"  syllables,  any  where 
but  at  the  end  or  middle  of  the  verse,  are  a  confession,  as 
the  case  may  be,  of  impotence  on  the  part  of  the  poet 
if  they  exist,  of  the  critic,  if  they  are  supposed  to  exist. 
And  no  great  admiration  has  been  hinted  of  the  extra- 
metrical  syllable  at  the  middle  in  any  case.  I  believe, 
however,  that  at  this  critical  moment  in  the  history  of 
blank  verse  and,  through  the  influence  of  this  on  rhyme, 
in  the  history  of  English  poetry  generally,  the  mistake  or 
laches  of  indulging  in  this  internal  excrescence  brought 
about  a  great  good.  A  large,  a  very  large,  number  of 
lines  could  be  pointed  out  where  such  a  syllable  is  almost 
undoubtedly  intended  by  the  poet  (supposing  he  thought 
about  it  at  all)  as  a  licence  of  the  kind,  and  not  to  be 
carried  on  to  the  other  half  of  the  line.  As  such,  the  effect 
is  almost  always  ugly  ;  it  can  only  be  admired  by  those 
persons  (with  whom  the  present  writer  most  heartily 
differs,  though  he  has  been  confused  with  them)  who 
think  that  an  irregularity  must  be  an  improvement,  that 
a  mole  must  be  a  beauty,  that  discord  must  be 
harmonious.  But  such  an  ear  as  Shakespeare's  could 
not  fail  to  perceive  that  this  ugliness  could  be  turned  into 
a  beauty  by  simply  effecting  the  connection,  and  fusing 
the  derelict  syllable  with  the  following  iamb  to  make  an 
harmonious  anapaest.1  And  this,  I  have  myself  not  the 
slightest  doubt,  was,  in  his  and  other  cases,  the  actual 
genesis  (whether  consciously  and  deliberately  carried  out 
does  not,  once  more,  in  the  least  matter)  of  the  revived 
trisyllabic  foot  which  Gascoigne  had  bewailed  as  dead. 
And  so  the  discord  was  made  harmonious  ;  the  mole  did 

1  Those  who  like  amphibrachs  may,  of  course,  join  it  to  the  preceding, 
not  the  following,  iamb.     To  my  ear  this  arrangement  is  generally  inferior. 


54  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

become  a  beauty  ;  and  the  irregularity  was  the  foundation 
of  the  larger  and  nobler  Rule.  The  process,  in  fact,  is 
one  of  the  best  examples  of  that  operation  of  growth  and 
life  to  which  the  people  who  say  that  the  ballad  writers 
never  thought  about  contending  for  the  liberty  of  this  very 
trisyllabic  foot  itself,  seem  insensible.  I  do  not  know 
whether  the  wind  thinks  about  blowing  or  the  flower  about 
growing,  but  I  know  that  they  blow  and  grow. 

The  redundant  The  use  at  the  end  of  the  syllable,  redundant  or  extra- 
syllable,  metrical — if  we  must  have  the  word,  though  to  me  extra- 
metre  is  no  metre — has  a  different  history.  At  the  middle 
it  is  very  rarely  a  beauty  ;  perhaps  never,  unless  it  can  be 
"  carried  over  "  as  just  described.  At  the  end  it  is  often 
beautiful ;  and,  whether  beauty  or  not,  is  almost  inevitable 
now  and  then,  and  most  useful  constantly.  Further,  it  is 
a  most  powerful  and  important  instrument  of  variation — 
a  natural  link  or  remedy  against  line  -  isolation,  far- 
descended  as  has  been  said,  and  of  other  excellent 
differences.  But  it  is  something  of  a  Delilah — who  was 
herself  apparently  of  a  good  Philistine  family,  and  is 
known  to  have  had  exceptional  attractions  as  a  person. 
Indeed,  the  parable  or  parallel  works  out  with  remarkable 
exactness  ;  for  it  is  a  very  considerable  time  before  Delilah 
takes  away  Samson's  strength,  and  the  means  whereby 
she  does  so  are  mysterious.  It  can  hardly  be  said 
(though  one  may  feel  a  vague  sense  of  danger)  that  in 
Shakespeare's  own  probably  latest  plays,  where  he  indulges 
himself  with  the  redundant  line,  Samson  is  anything  but 
Samson  still.  There  are  passages  on  passages  in  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher  themselves — notably  that  magnificent 
piece  in  The  False  One,  which  is  one  of  the  purplest 
patches  in  the  coat  of  Elizabethan  drama — where  the 
hendecasyllable  has  it  nearly  all  its  own  way,  with  no 
harm  and  much  good.  But  Delilah  is  still  Delilah  ;  and 
she  is  too  much  for  Samson — the  verse  if  not  the  verse- 
smith — at  last. 

Enjambment.  She  takes  indeed  two  forms  :  for  much  the  same  as 
has  been  said  of  the  redundant  syllable  may  be  said  of 
enjambment  or  overlapping.  This,  indeed,  is  rather  the 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  55 

special  Delilah  of  the  couplet  than  of  blank  verse,  but 
each  kind  has  to  be  very  wary  when  it  visits  the  vale  of 
Sorek  in  this  manner  also.  Opportunity  of  delight  and 
occasion  for  display  of  power  as  it  is  to  the  verse  that 
keeps  itself  strong  and  wide  awake,  overlapping  is  a  place 
of  slipping,  and  may  be  a  pit  of  destruction,  to  the  loose- 
girt  and  careless  versifier.  And  it  has,  in  common  with 
redundancy  and  with  the  use  of  trisyllabic  feet,  the  special 
danger  that  it  is  perfectly  easy  to  do  it  badly.  Anybody, 
as  soon  as  these  devices  are  once  recognised,  can  practise 
them  after  a  fashion,  and  everybody  proceeds  to  do  so  : 
whence  come  things  for  tears. 

But  the  offence  is  his  by  whom  the  offence  cometh  ;  The  morpho- 
and  Shakespeare  in  his  complete  work  showed  that  there  °^  oft>iank 
was  no  necessity  of  offence  at  all,  while  there  was  the  verse. 
possibility  (and  in  his  case  the  accomplishment)  of  infinite 
beauty.  Foolish  things  have,  no  doubt,  been  said — in 
fact  they  are  not  unfrequently  said  at  the  present  moment 
— as  to  the  superiority  of  blank  verse  to  rhyme  ;  and  we 
shall  have  to  deal  with  them,  and  with  those  from  Milton 
downwards  who  have  been  and  are  guilty  of  them,  as 
they  occur.  At  present  it  is  sufficient  to  point  out,  first, 
that  the  misvaluation  is  merely  a  case  of  the  common 
inability  to  like  two  good  things  without  putting  them 
into  unjust  balances  and  weighing  them  against  each 
other  with  unstamped  weights.  Secondly,  that,  for 
this  purpose  and  that,  blank  verse  is  not  superior  to 
rhyme  but  demonstrably  inferior.  It  will  not  do — at 
least  it  has  not  done — for  strict  lyric,  as  the  moderate 
success  even  of  Campion  or  Collins,  and  the  failure  of 
almost  everybody  else,  have  well  shown.  It  is  a  great 
question  whether  it  is  not  a  very  dangerous  medium 
even  for  long  narrative  poems.  But  for  short  narratives  : 
for  short  reflective,  descriptive,  didactic,  and  other  pieces 
of  various  kinds  :  and  for  every  kind  of  drama,  or  even 
partially  dramatic  matter,  it  is,  in  English,  the  predestined 
medium,  hammered  out  at  first  by  a  full  generation  and 
more  of  partly  unsuccessful,  never  more  than  partly 
successful,  pioneers  and  journeymen,  chipped  into  perfect 


56  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

form  by  the  master  Shakespeare,  in  probably  not  half  a 
generation  longer.  Its  extraordinary  and  unique  success 
in  English — for  German  blank  verse,  good  as  it  can  be, 
is  far  inferior,  especially  in  variety  and  music  ;  and  I  know 
no  thirdsman  that  deserves  to  rank — is  probably  due  to 
the  fact  that  our  language,  though  perhaps  singly  accented, 
is  not  singly  emphasised  ;  that  it  provides  a  large  number 
of  sufficient  resting-places  for  the  voice,  but  does  not  require 
(or,  except  as  an  exception,  allow)  long  dwelling  on  any. 
The  way  in  which  not  merely  the  French  but  almost  all 
continental  nations  hurry  over  half-a-dozen  or  a  dozen 
syllables,  and  then  plunge  on  the  succeeding  one  with 
a  volley  of  exploding  and  shrapnel-like  emphasis,  utterly 
ruins  blank  verse,  whether  as  articulately  delivered,  or 
as  read  with  that  inarticulate  but  exactly  proportioned 
following  of  actual  delivery  which  is  necessary  for 
prosodic  appreciation.  It  is  one  of  the  worst  faults  of 
the  stress-  or  accent-  or  beat-system,  as  opposed  to  the 
foot,  that  it  vulgarises  and  impoverishes  this  great  metre, 
where  the  unstressed  syllables  are  no  less  important  than 
the  stressed.  It  is  essential  to  blank  verse  that  no  part 
of  it  should  be  killed,  and  none  brought  into  convulsive 
and  galvanic  activity :  otherwise  the  delicate  and  com- 
plicated or  simple  and  yet  substantial  melody  is  jarred 
and  jangled  out  of  all  tune  and  time.  Yet  what  infinite 
variety  of  time  and  tune  can  be  got  out  of  it — not  by 
"  getting  up  stairs  "  on  the  instrument,  and  flinging  oneself 
down  again,  but  by  evoking  the  infinite  variety  of  its 
tones  Shakespeare,  Milton,  Thomson,  Shelley,  Tennyson, 
Browning,  have  shown  us.  But  the  greatest  of  these, 
and  the  first,  and  the  master  of  all  the  rest  in  even  the 
details  and  peculiarities  in  which  each  is  himself  a  master, 
is  Shakespeare. 

The  Poems.  It  would  be  a  pity  not  to  pursue  this  mastery,  without 
a  break,  into  the  other  and  minor  departments  in  which 
it  is  shown,  even  though  we  may  have  to  recur  to  the 
subject  hereafter.  It  is,  in  fact,  all  the  more  important 
and  almost  necessary  to  do  so,  in  that  the  earliest 
documents,  certainly  dated,  of  Shakespeare's  prosodic 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  57 

practice  that  we  have,  are  non-dramatic.  We  may  date 
by  guesswork  any  existing  dramatic  passages  of  the 
earlier  blank -verse  type,  such  as  those  which  excited 
Greene's  spleen  certainly,  and  his  envy  not  improbably, 
as  much  before  1593  as  we  like;  but  we  know  nothing 
dramatic  of  Shakespeare's  before  that  time,  and  hardly 
anything  for  five  years  after  it  Venus  and  Adonis, 
on  the  other  hand,  and  Lucrece  are  assured  facts  of  that 
year,  1593,  and  its  successor.  Now  at  the  date  of  the 
earlier  The  Faerie  Queene  was  but  three  years  old,  and 
The  Shepherd's  Kalendar  itself  but  thirteen  ;  while  the 
great  sonnet-outburst  was  only  beginning,  and  Drayton, 
the  chief  non- dramatic  poet  of  Shakespeare's  exact 
generation,  had  published  nothing  previously  but  the 
Harmony  of  the  Church. 

To  say  that  the  sixains  of  Venus  and  Adonis  and  the  Venus  and 
rhyme-royal  of  Lucrece  are  perfect,  would  be  mere  "  blind  Adon"- 
affection,"  as  Ben  Jonson  says.  They  are  not ;  and  they 
would  be  much  less  interesting  if  they  were.  For  in  that 
case  the  experienced  and  unsatisfactory  critic  would 
expect  with  a  rueful  certainty,  what  has  happened  in  so 
many  other  cases  of  mocking-birds,  who  can  learn  any- 
thing but  do  nothing.  The  individual  verses  of  the 
Venus  have  the  mark  which  we  have  seen  so  often  before, 
and  which  is  an  infallible  symptom  of  the  desire  at  any 
cost,  however  unconsciously,  to  get  rid  of  the  abominable 
looseness  of  preceding  generations — the  mark  of  excessive 
self-completion,  of  what  we  have  called  the  bullet-mould. 
Just  as  in  the  blanks,  this  effect  is  independent  of  mere 
punctuation  at  the  verse  end  ;  you  will  find  it  in  such  a 
line  as — 

The  studded  bridle  on  a  ragged  bough 

where  there  is  no  stop  at  all,  not  so  much  as  a  comma. 
And  in  the  same  way  the  final  couplet  is  apt  to  be  too 
much  isolated  from  the  quatrain — a  thing  which,  as  has 
been  also  pointed  out,  was  a  valuable  school  for  the  con- 
tinuous stopped  couplet  itself,  but  which  is  not  always 
a  beauty  in  the  stanza.  But  here,  also,  the  daemonic 


58  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

element  in  Shakespeare  shows  itself,  and  here,  fortunately, 
we  can  say  that  it  shows  itself  at  once.  While  he  is 
musing  over  the  supposed  requirements  of  the  metre  the 
fire  kindles,  and  the  metre  itself  is  transposed,  transformed, 
transfused,  under  his  hand.  Spenser  had  begun  the 
Kalendar  with  this  very  stave  thirteen  years  before, 
and  had  done  nobly  with  it.  But  though  perhaps  the 
stanza  "  Thou  barren,  etc.,"  formerly  quoted,  has  a  certain 
marmoreal  dignity  which  the  more  passionate  and  human 
strains  of  the  Venus  do  not  invite,  the  advance  in  this 
direction  of  passionate  humanity  represented  by  prosodic 
movement  is  very  great.  It  is  no  wonder  that  musicians 
should  have  seen  the  extraordinarily  lyrical  movement  of 
"  Bid  me  discourse,"  or  that  painters  and  naturalists  should 
have  acknowledged  the  astonishing  feats  of  the  episode 
of  the  horse.  But  the  evidences  of  prosodic  adequacy 
are  omniform  and  omnipresent.  In  the  single  and  early 
line- 
Ten  kisses  short  as  one,  one  long  as  twenty, 

there  is,  when  we  consider  the  stage  both  of  the  poetry 
and  of  the  poet,  an  almost  uncanny  mastery  in  the  loca- 
tion of  the  pause,  the  distribution  of  the  words  of  the 
hemistich,  and  the  adoption  of  the  redundant  syllable. 
So  with  the  trisyllabic  centre  of 

Leading  him  prisoner  in  a  red  rose  chain, 

and  the  fingering  of  the  vowels  and  of  the  suggested 
trochees  in 

Her  two  blue  |  windows  j  faintly  |  she  upheaveth. 

Rhyme -royal  is  a  far  finer  measure  than  the  sixain  ; 
but,  as  we  have  noted  already,  it  seems  to  be  rather  a 
capricious  mistress,  and  not  to  reward  all  its  lovers 
equally.  Certainly  Shakespeare  does  not  get  out  of  it, 
in  proportion  to  its  possibilities,  quite  the  effect  which,  at 
a  yet  earlier  stage,  he  produces  with  the  other.  Indeed, 
Lucrece.  one  might  not  be  unjustified  in  the  suspicion  that  Lucrece, 
though  the  later  published,  was  the  earlier  written  of  the 
two.  There  are  more  of  the  mere  tricks,  rhetorical  rather 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  59 

* 

than  poetical,  of  epanaphora  and  the  like  :  the  separate 
model  of  the  lines  is  more  constantly  maintained  ;  and 
the  tetremimeral  caesura,  which,  as  we  can  guess  from 
Gascoigne's  warning,  was  a  sort  of  fetich  with  rhyme-royal 
writers,  imposes  its  monotonous  clutch  too  often.  It  is 
more  like  a  school-exercise  than  anything  else  of  Shake- 
speare's, though  it  is  the  exercise  of  a  very  remarkable 
schoolboy  indeed.  Besides,  the  perfection  to  which  . 
rhyme-royal  had  been  brought  already,  and  by  others,  at 
once  made  the  exercise  easy,  and  deprives  it  of  interest. 
It  was  probably  the  sense  that,  after  Chaucer  and 
Sackville,  little  more  was  to  be  done  with  it  that  made 
Spenser  reject  it  for  his  great  work,  and  even  Shakespeare 
could  not,  or  at  least  did  not,  prove  him  wrong. 

Very  different  is  it  with  the  Sonnets.  We  are,  of  Tiie  Sonnets. 
course,  free  here  from  the  self-sought  obsessions  in  respect 
of  subject  or  object  which  beset  so  many  students  of 
these  marvellous  compositions.  It  is  enough  for  us  that 
they  exist,  and  that  Meres's  reference  shows  that  at  any 
rate  some  of  them  existed  at  a  pretty  early  period  of 
Shakespeare's  career ;  while  the  general — not  of  course 
quite  universal — equality  of  the  model  makes  it  very 
unnecessary  to  disturb  ourselves  with  the  futile  inquiry 
whether  any,  and  if  so  which,  of  them  were  not  or  might 
not  have  been  handed  about  among  his  private  friends 
before  1598.  Here  the  poet  has  a  medium  which  is 
absolutely  congenial  to  him,  and  with  which,  as  with 
blank  verse,  he  can  do  anything  he  likes.  With  his  usual 
sagacity  he  chooses  the  English  form,  and  prefers  its 
extremest  variety — that  of  the  three  quatrains  and  couplet, 
without  any  interlacing  rhyme.  Nevertheless  he  gives 
the  full  sonnet-effect — not  merely  by  the  distribution 
(which  he  does  not  always  observe,  though  he  often  does) 
of  octave  and  sestet  subject,  but  very  mainly  by  that  same 
extraordinary  symphonising  of  the  prosodic  effects  of 
individual  and  batched  verses,  which  was  his  secret  in 
blank  verse  itself.  If  it  seem  surprising  that  so  difficult 
and  subtle  a  medium  should  be  mastered  so  early,  let  it 
be  remembered  that  the  single-line  mould,  properly  used, 


60  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

is  by  no  means  unsuitable  to  the  sonnet,  the  effect  of 
which  is  definitely  cumulative.  We  have  no  certain  or 
even  probable  sonnets  of  Marlowe's,  for  the  three  coarse 
but  fairly  vigorous  ones  by  "  Ignoto,"  usually  printed  with 
his  works,  are  very  unlikely  to  be  his.  But  if  he  had  written 
any  he  would  not  have  had  to  alter  his  mode  of  line 
much  in  itself.  He  would,  however,  have  had  to  adjust 
it  relatively,  as  he  seldom  did,  and  as  Shakespeare 
began  to  do  from  the  first,  by  weighting  it  variously, 
by  applying  what  we  have  called  the  "  quicksilver " 
touch. 

It  is  by  this  combined  cumulative  and  diversifying 
effect,  this  beating  up  against  the  wind  as  it  were,1  that 
the  ordinary  and  extraordinary  "  tower  "  of  these  sonnets 
is  produced  ;  and  this  tower  is  to  some  readers  their  great 
and  inexhaustible  charm.  No  matter  what  the  subject 
is,  the  "  man  right  fair  "  or  "  the  woman  coloured  ill,"  the 
incidents  of  daily  joy  and  chagrin,  or  those  illimitable 
meditations  on  life  and  love  and  thought  at  large  which 
eternise  the  more  ephemeral  things, — the  process,  prosodic 
and  poetic,  is  more  or  less  the  same,  though  carefully  kept 
from  monotony.  In  the  very  first  lines  there  is  the 
spread  and  beating  of  the  wing  ;  the  flight  rises  till  the 
end  of  the  douzain,  when  it  stoops  or  sinks  quietly  to  the 
close  in  the  couplet.  The  intermediate  devices  by  which 
this  effect  is  produced  are,  as  always  with  Shakespeare, 
hard  to  particularise.  Here,  as  in  the  kindred  region  of 
pure  style,  he  has  so  little  mannerism,  that  it  is  easier  to 
apprehend  than  to  analyse  his  manner.  It  may  be  a 
coincidence,  or  it  may  not,  that  in  a  very  large  proportion 
of  the  openings  what  we  may  call  a  bastard  caesura,  or 
ending  of  a  word  without  much  metrical  scission  at  the 
third  syllable,  precedes  a  strictly  metrical  one  at  the 
fourth.2  Another  point  is  that,  throughout,  full  stops  or 

1  Shakespeare,  like  a  sensible  man  as  he  was,  did  not  care  a  rush  about 
the  consecutiveness  of  his  own  metaphors ;  indeed  it  is  doubtful  whether  any 
sensible  man,  except  Theophile  Gautier,  ever  did. 

2  In  other  words  the  fourth  half-foot  is  constantly  monosyllabic.      "  Look 
in  thy  glass"  (iii.)  is  the  first,  and  there  are  a  dozen  others  in  the  first  two 
dozen  sonnets. 


CHAP,  i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  61 

their  equivalents  in  mid-line  are  extremely  rare,  and  even 
at  the  end  not  common,  till  the  twelfth,  so  that  the  run 
of  the  whole  is  uninterrupted,  though  its  rhythm  is 
constantly  diversified.  Redundant  syllables  are  very  rare, 
except  where,  as  in  Ixxxvii.,  they  are  accumulated  with 
evident  purpose.  The  trisyllabic  foot,  though  used  with 
wonderful  effect  sometimes,  is  used  very  sparingly.  On 
the  whole  Shakespeare  seems  here  to  have  had  for  his 
object,  or  at  any  rate  to  have  achieved  as  his  effect,  the 
varying  of  the  line  with  as  little  as  possible  breach  or 
ruffling  of  it.  He  allows  himself  a  flash  or  blaze  of 
summer  lightning  now  and  then,  but  no  fussing  with 
continual  crackers.  All  the  prosodic  handling  is  subdued 
to  give  that  steady  passionate  musing — that  "  emotion 
recollected  in  tranquillity  " — which  is  characteristic  of  the 
best  sonnets,  and  of  his  more  than  almost  of  any  others. 
Of  mere  "  sports,"  such  as  the  octosyllabic  cxlv.,  it  is 
hardly  necessary  to  speak. 

There  remain  to  be  discussed  the  miscellaneous  metres  Miscellaneous 
in  the  Plays  themselves,  and  the  Songs.  Of  the  former  metres- 
not  very  much  need  be  said.  The  fourteeners,  the 
doggerel,  the  stanzas,  the  octosyllables,  and  the  rhymed 
couplets  are  quite  clearly  makeshifts  and  stopgaps, 
dictated  not  (with  a  possible  exception  in  the  last  case) 
by  the  poet's  sense  that  they  make  good  dramatic  media, 
but  at  the  most  by  an  experimentalising  tendency,  at  the 
least  by  mere  noviceship  and  the  following  of  others. 
It  is,  however,  really  curious  how  the  faculty  of  turning 
everything  touched  more  or  less  to  gold,  appears  here 
also.  Into  the  doggerel  and  the  fourteeners,  especially  in 
Love's  Labour's  Lost,  as  well  as  into  the  short  stanza-verse 
of  A  Midsummer  Nighfs  Dream,  Shakespeare  infuses  an 
inimitable  touch  of  parody  which  had  not  been  seen  in 
English  prosodic  handling  since  Sir  Thopas ;  and  like 
Chaucer  he  takes  care  to  make  his  parody  particularly 
smooth  and  correct  in  its  very  absurdity.  The  octosyllables  The  octo- 
(mostly  shortened  to  trochaic  heptasyllables,  and  so  syllable- 
patterning  that  delightful  variation  for  the  future)  of 
the  close  of  the  Dream,  of  the  Epilogue  of  The  Tempest,  of 


62  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

the  scrolls  in  The  Merchant  of  Venice  and  As  you  Like 
It,  of  the  Gower  Prologues  (some  of  them  among  the 
most  Shakespearian  things  in  the  play),  in  Pericles,  show 
an  absolute  command  of  this  old  and  charming  measure, 
so  easy  in  appearance,  so  difficult  to  preserve  from  sing- 
song and  prose  in  reality.  The  stanza-speeches  of  the 
early  and  middle-early  plays  are  too  few  and  too  unim- 
portant  to  require  much  attention.  But  the  decasyllabic 
couplets.  couplets  are  in  a  somewhat  different  position,  considering 
the  abiding  importance  of  that  vehicle  in  English. 
This  importance  is,  of  course,  somewhat  diminished  by 
the  fact  that  they  are  almost  entirely,  either  as  has  been 
said,  makeshifts,  or  else  dictated  by  the  well-known  cue- 
purpose — the  desire  to  wind  up  a  scene,  or  part  of  a 
scene,  with  a  ring-beat  agreeable  to  the  audience  and 
convenient  to  the  actors.  It  will,  however,  be  at  once 
evident  that  this  latter  object  of  itself  prescribes  a  certain 
decision  and  precision  in  the  sound,  as  well  as  in  the 
sense  of  the  distichs,  and  so  makes  them  inevitable 
patterns  and  stimulants  in  the  cultivation  of  the  stopped 
and  epigrammatic  form.  Many  of  the  most  emphatic  and 
clearest-ringing  passages  in  Shakespeare — for  instance, 
lago's  mocking  praise  of  women  and  his  half-triumphant, 
half-apprehensive  anticipation  of  the  night  of  murder — 
take  this  form.  In  the  early  and  middle-early  plays,  as 
we  have  seen,  and  sometimes  later  for  an  object  (as  in 
the  cases  just  mentioned),  not  merely  end-couplets  but 
whole  passages  fall  into  rhyme  ;  but  the  couplet  is  most 
commonly l  of  the  stopped  form — which  indeed  the  poet 
had  practised  in  his  two  earliest  positively  known  works, 
both  of  them  non-dramatic,  as  code  to  the  sixain  and  the 
rhyme-royal.  When,  on  the  other  hand,  he  wanted  to 
overlap,  his  growing  sense  of  the  possibilities  of  blank 
verse  made  him  independent  of  the  couplet,  or  positively 
disinclined  to  it.  Thus,  in  the  battle  which  we  are 
shortly  to  witness,  his  powerful  influence  and  example  is, 
by  a  rather  quaint  accident,  on  the  side  of  the  less  Romantic 
form  as  against  the  more  Romantic. 

1  Not,  of  course,  always. 


CHAP. 'i        SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  63 

If  good  wine  needs  no  bush,  pure  nectar  needs  it  still  The  Songs. 
less ;  and  who  shall  praise  Shakespeare's  songs  ?  Yet 
they  touch  us  too  nearly  to  be  entirely  passed  over.  It 
is  at  least  remarkable  that,  except  Peele  in  a  few  places, 
and  Lyly  (with  whom  he  has  a  connection — never,  of 
course,  missed,  but  perhaps,  on  the  whole,  rather  under- 
than  over -valued),  Shakespeare's  predecessors  do  not 
seem  to  have  thoroughly  appreciated  the  charm  of  the 
lyric  element,  which  he  and  his  successors  were  to  make 
a  feature  of  the  Elizabethan  drama,  and  one  of  the 
loveliest.  This  is  all  the  more  remarkable  in  that  two  of 
them,  Lodge  and  Greene,  are  prodigal  of  beautiful  songs 
in  their  prose  work.  Marlowe  has  no  songs,  nor,  I  think, 
has  Kyd  any  worth  speaking  of.  Even  Peele,  himself 
a  perfect  master  of  them,  does  not  use  them  in  every 
play. 

But  Shakespeare  employs  the  lyre,  and  shows  his  skill 
in  it,  from  the  very  first — "  Who  is  Sylvia  ?  "  in  The  Tivo 
Gentlemen,  and  "  When  daisies  pied "  in  Love's  Labour's 
Lost — to  Ariel's  ineffable  music  at  the  very  last.  We 
shall  deal  with  the  whole  subject  of  this  song- cycle 
presently,  but  it  is  proper  and  important  to  observe  here 
that  Shakespeare's  absolute  prosodic  mastery  is  hardly  in 
any  division  more  conspicuous.  We  saw,  in  dealing  with 
the  pre-Shakespearian  Miscellanies,  that  the  endeavour 
to  match  words  to  music  had  already  communicated  a  great 
apparent  variety  to  measure  ;  but  that  prosodic  develop- 
ment had  not  quite  kept  pace  with  musical  adaptation. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  we  turn  to  the  now  well-known 
music-books,  we  shall  find  that  the  more  exquisite  word- 
masters — Campion,  "  those  about  Jones,"  and  others — do 
not  so  very  often  (though,  of  course,  they  do  sometimes) 
affect  very  zig-zaggy  formulas.  But  Shakespeare,  from 
first  to  last,  seems  to  have  had  entirely  at  his  command 
the  "  wood  notes  wild "  that  Milton  (a  skilled  musician, 
remember,  as  well  as,  which  is  a  very  different  thing,  a 
prosodist,  inferior  to  hardly  anybody  but  Shakespeare 
himself)  recognised  in  him.  I  suppose  it  is  probable, 
though  I  do  not  think  it  at  all  certain,  that  he  may  have 


64  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

always  written  to  existing  airs,1  but,  unless  I  mistake, 
these  airs  do  not  exist  in  at  least  the  great  majority  of 
cases.  Nor  are  the  well-known  modern  settings  (with  a 
few  exceptions,  such  as  the  well-known  "  Under  the 
greenwood  tree  ")  by  any  means  self-imposing  or  authorita- 
tive to  a  carefully  trained  prosodic  ear.  On  the  other 
hand,  to  such  an  ear,  there  is  hardly  one  of  these  songs 
that  does  not  carry  its  own  prosodic  music  with  it, 
infallibly  and  exquisitely  married.  Here  Shakespeare 
indeed  "  fulfils  all  numbers."  There  is  no  better  text 
for  that  iambic-trochaic  substitution,  with  which  the  accent 
people  make  such  wild  work,  than  Ariel's  first  and  greatest 
song.  Nobody  had  yet  used  a  trisyllabic  foot,  which,  in 
its  connection  with  hitherto  unbroken  trochees,  may  be 
allowed  to  be  dactylic,  as  in  the  "  Merrily,  merrily "  of 
his  last  But  these,  it  may  be  said,  are  absolute  master- 
pieces— the  last  achievement  of  many  a  tentative.  Next 
door,  so  to  speak,  in  place,  perhaps  twenty  years  or  more 
earlier  in  time,  comes  "  Who  is  Sylvia  ?  "  where  the  proper 
name  itself  and  the  use  of  it  are  simply  "  signatures," 
guarantees  of  prosodic  omnipotence,  endorsed  by  the 
double  rhymes  of  the  even  lines.  From  this  point  of 
view  the  arrangement  of  the  folio  is  a  positive  advantage, 
because  it  shows  us  how  personal  and  immediate  this 
gift  was.  Even  if  some  of  the  songs,  not  merely  the  one 
or  two  which  are  well  known  to  occur  elsewhere,  were 
not  his  own,  the  general  character  of  all  is  too  uniform 
and  unmistakable  to  present  any  difficulty.  "  Take,  oh  ! 
take,"  the  triumph  of  the  pathetic  use  of  the  trochee  ; 
the  lighter  use  of  the  same  foot  in  "  Sigh  no  more  "  ;  and 
the  passing-bell  variation  in  the  dirge  on  Hero  (where  we 
must  scan,  not  as  in  "  Merrily,  |  merrily,"  but  "  Heavij-ly, 
heavi  -ly  ")  ;  the  new  trick  of  common  measure  in  Moth's 
"If  she  be  made  of  white  and  red";  and  the  perfect 
employment  of  the  "  bob  "  refrain  in  "  When  daisies  pied  " 
and  (with  a  difference)  in  "  Tell  me  where  is  fancy  bred  ?  " 
— all  these  things  are  pure  prosody.  They  do  not  want 

1  Sir  Frederick  Bridge,  I  think,  recently  handled  this  interesting  subject, 
but  I  have  merely  seen  a  newspaper  report  of  what  he  said. 


CHAP,  i         SHAKESPEARE  AND  BLANK  VERSE  65 

music  at  all,  though  they  will  greet  her  very  civilly  when 
she  comes,  and  make  her  welcome — if  she  deserves  it. 
And  this  is  still  more  the  case  with  the  twin  triumphs  of 
As  You  Like  It,  of  which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  though 
"  Under  the  greenwood  tree "  has  been  mated  without 
too  much  derogation,  "  Blow,  blow,  thou  winter  wind " 
still  awaits  an  Audrey  in  notes  that  shall  be  its  own,  and 
not  a  poor  thing. 

But,  luckily,  all  these  things  are  well  known,  and  our 
not  too  abundant  space  should  be  saved  for  others  that 
are  not  quite  so.  Let  it  suffice  to  say,  in  conclusion, 
that,  blank  verse  or  song,  sonnet  or  stanza,  Shakespeare 
achieves  everything  that  he  touches  ;  that  he  foots  it 
everywhere  with  perfect  featness ;  and  that  he  always 
does  foot  it.  His  harmonies  and  melodies  are  reducible 
to  the  nicely  constructed  and  regularly  equivalenced 
group,  not  to  the  haphazard  and  blundering  accent 
scheme.  They  are  independent  of  music,  though  quite 
willing  to  unite  with  it.  They  require  no  fantastic  laws 
of  sound  to  explain  them.  The  poet  simply  puts  his 
hand  into  the  exhaustless  lucky-bag  of  English  words, 
and  arranges  them  —  trochee  and  iamb  and  anapaest 
regularly,  spondee  and  dactyl  and  even  tribrach  when  he 
chooses — at  his  pleasure  and  for  ours. 


VOL.  II 


NOTE  ON   THE  PASSIONATE  PILGRIM,  ETC. 

IT  seems  unnecessary  to  say  much  on  the  partly  contentious 
"  minors  "  of  The  Passionate  Pilgrim,  etc.  There  are  things  in 
both  sonnet-  and  song-form  amply  worthy  of  Shakespeare,  and 
there  are  few  more  curious  instances  of  the  way  in  which  the 
mathematically  same  metre  can  receive  an  infinite  prosodic 
difference  than  the  fall  of 

King  Panjdion,  |  he  is  |  dead, 
and  the  rise  of 

Let  I  the  bird  |  of  loud  jest  lay 

(which  fall  and  rise,  be  it  observed,  are  inappreciable  on  the 
stress -system).  But  they  hardly  give,  in  themselves,  anything 
prosodic  that  we  cannot  find  elsewhere,  and  they  are  doubtfully 
Shakespeare's  as  far  as  proof  goes. 


66 


CHAPTER    II 

THE    OTHER    "  ELIZABETHAN  "    DRAMATISTS 

The  shortness  of  the  blank -verse  season — And  its  causes — The 
practitioners  —  Jonson  —  Chapman  —  Marston  —  Dekker  — 
Webster — Rowley — Middleton  —  Hey  wood — Tourneur — Day 
— The  minors — General  remarks  —  Note  on  Shakespearian 
"  Doubtful "  Plays. 


IT  would  obviously  be  impossible,  and  if  possible  it  would  The  shortness 

of  the  blank- 
verse  season. 


be  supererogatory,  to  go  through  the  entire  works  of  the  ° 


contemporaries  of  Shakespeare  with  the  same  minuteness 
which  has  been  observed  in  dealing  with  Shakespeare 
himself,  or  even  with  as  much  as  has  been  allotted  to  his 
predecessors.  The  very  object,  or  one  of  the  objects,  of 
that  minuteness  in  his  case,  was  to  render  such  an 
expatiation  unnecessary.  For  he  touched,  at  one  time  or 
another,  almost  all  possible  forms  of  blank  verse  :  and  it 
would  skill  but  little  to  trace  them  out  here  as  they  recur 
in  individual  cases,  though  editors  of  the  individual  works 
may  very  properly  do  so.  That  something  like  such  a 
tracing  has  gone  to  the  preparation  of  this  book  the 
reader  may  be  assured — that  only  the  results  should  be 
supplied  in  the  composition  of  it  he  may  justly  claim.  I 
believe  there  is  not  a  playwright,  from  Chapman  and 
Jonson  to  Goff  and  Glapthorne,  whom  I  have  not  con- 
sidered in  order  to  draw  up  these  summaries  ;  but  I  cannot 
think  it  necessary  to  march  them  all  across  my  limited 
stage  that  each  may  answer  "  Here ! "  Indeed,  too 
meticulous  a  review  might  positively  obscure  one  of  the 
most  important  facts  to  be  brought  out  by  it — the 
•extremely  rapid  passing  of  the  flower  of  blank  verse.  It 

67 


68  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

did  not  come  very  rapidly  into  full  beauty  —  there  are 
some  forty  years  between  Gorboduc  and  Hamlet.  But 
before  another  forty  had  passed  it  was  all  overblown  : 
it  may  be  questioned  whether  its  best  bloom  was  not 
over  in  half  the  time. 

And  its  causes.  That  this  must  almost  necessarily  be  the  case  with  a 
form  depending  so  much  on  individual  genius,  admitting 
so  many  and  such  perilous  licences  and  varieties,  is 
obvious  enough.  To  get  immortelles,  here  as  elsewhere, 
you  must  sacrifice  a  good  deal  in  colour,  odour,  and  shape. 
But  there  were  certain  particular  causes  which  at  this  time 
hastened  its  decay  ;  and  these  it  must  be  our  business  to 
bring  out  by  or  from  the  usual  survey  of  the  contents  of 
the  subject,  if  but  a  summary  one.  And  first  of  Ben.1 

The  practi-  That  Ben   Jonson  was  a  great  master,  and   probably 


noners—         Qne    Qf   our    grst    conscious    an(j    deliberate    masters,    of 
Jonson. 

prosody,  must  be  clear  to  any  one  who  has  even  the 
slightest  knowledge  of  his  work  ;  and  especially  of  the 
exquisite  lyrics  which  will  be  handled  later.  But  if  we 
had  only  his  regular  plays  (the  masques  are  really  part 
of  the  lyrics)  it  might  not  be  easy  to  speak  so  highly 
of  him  in  this  particular  respect.  He  uses  a  very  great 
deal  of  prose  —  admirable  prose  too  —  but  with  that  we 
have  nothing  to  do.  And  when  he  comes  to  blank  verse 
the  atmosphere  of  prose  seems  to  remain  with  him.  It  is 
correct  enough  :  in  fact  it  is  too  correct,  in  the  earlier 
plays  at  least,  while  though  in  the  later  there  is  much 
more  liberty  taken  with  the  number  of  syllables,  and 
though  both  in  earlier  and  later  there  is  no  lack  of 
redundance,  real  flexibility  and  ease  are  seldom  gained. 
It  is  curious  that  the  single  mould  still  prevails  —  in  fact, 
as  we  shall  see,  it  is  very  rarely  got  rid  of  ;  and  even 
strong  middle  pauses,  not  always  rigidly  "  middle,"  do  not 
succeed  in  giving  the  poetic-prosodic  phrase,  the  many- 
centredness  of  which  is  Shakespeare's  secret.  Where 
Jonson's  blank  verse  is  really  fine,  it  is  usually  in  rather 

1  A  great  deal  of  work  has  been  recently  done  on  Jonson  both  in  England, 
in  America,  and  in  France.  I  have  a  fair  acquaintance  with  this.  For  our 
purpose,  however,  it  is  not  necessary  to  go  beyond  the  three-volume  Gifford- 
Cunningham  edition,  published  originally  by  Hotten  (London,  n.d.). 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS  69 

long  and  rather  rhetorical  tirades  —  pieces  of  verse  - 
declamation  which,  no  doubt,  had  a  great  effect  on  Dryden 
afterwards,  and  which  would  have  gone  as  well  or  better 
in  the  couplet.  Indeed,  if  we  did  not  know  that  he 
thought  couplets  "  the  bravest  sort  of  verses,"  we  could 
have  guessed  it.  His  own  couplet  pieces,  such  as  the 
famous  eulogy  of  Shakespeare  himself,  quite  carry  out 
this  idea.  But  for  all  this  no  disrespect  is  intended  to 
the  actual  "  blanks."  Sejanus  is  perhaps  the  chief  place 
for  a  blank-verse  line  which  marks  the  transition  from 
Marlowe  to  Dryden  himself  in  might  and  weight  ;  while 
it  is  not  a  little  noticeable  that  in  the  fine  speech l  of 
Arruntius  here,  and  in  others,  the  polycentric  state  is  by 
no  means  ill-attained. 

The  fact  is  (and  though  a  certain  kind  of  commentator 
would  take  it  as  a  natural  result  of  the  traditional  hard- 
ness and  ruggedness  of  Ben's  disposition,  it  is  a  most 
surprising  contrast  with  the  sweetness  of  his  lyrics)  that 
all  his  blank  verse  is  hard,  though  all  is  not  rugged. 
From  Every  Man  in  his  Humour  or  The  Case  is  Altered, 
whichever  he  may  have  really  written  first,  to  the  fragment 
of  The  Fall  of  Mortimer,  we  have  nearly  forty  years'  practice 
in  the  medium.  Some  of  the  best  passages  are  really 
fine  ;  not  merely  the  speech  of  Arruntius  just  glanced  at, 
which  is  really  in  the  noblest  Roman  tone ;  not  merely 
the  brilliant  extravagance  of  Sir  Epicure's  sensual  visions 
in  The  Alchemist ; 2  not  merely  Catiline's  great  speech  to 

1  Or  speeches,  as  they  actually  meet  the  eye  in  Act  IV.  Sc.  v.      But  that 
which  begins  as  a  soliloquy — 

Still  dost  thou  suffer,  Heaven  ?  will  no  flame, 
No  heat  of  sin,  make  thy  just  wrath  to  boil 
In  thy  distempered  bosom,  and  o'erflow 
The  pitchy  blazes  of  impiety  ? 

is  really  continued,  after  not  a  little  dialogue  and  incident,  by 

I  would  begin  to  study  'em,  if  I  thought 

They  would  secure  me,  etc., 
and 

He  is  our  monster  :  forfeited  to  vice 

So  far,  as  no  racked  virtue  can  redeem  him, 
and  the  rest. 

2  And  roll  us  dry  in  gossamer  and  roses 

is  a  good  example  here. 


70  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

the  soldiers  when  he  is  driven  to  bay,1  and  some  of  the 
long  and  undramatic  but  powerful  tirades  of  Cynthia's 
Revels,  and  the  Poetaster,  and  Volpone,  and  The  Devil's  an 
Ass,  and  even  the  "  dotages "  ;  but  very  many  smaller 
and  shorter  passages  scattered  everywhere.  Still,  the 
hardness  is  everywhere  too  ;  the  verse  is  rock  or  metal, 
not  flesh. 

And  what  is  most  curious  and  interesting  of  all  is  that 
at  the  touch  of  rhyme  the  rock,  the  metal,  becomes  flesh. 
I  do  not  refer  to  the  inserted  lyrics,  though  the  choruses 
interspersed  in  the  austere  verse  of  Catiline,  grave  as  they 
are,  would  almost  prove  my  point.  This  is  illustrated 
over  and  over  again  in  the  exquisite  Sad  Shepherd,  where 
the  drops  into  rhyming  are  very  well  worth  comparison 
with  those  in  the  not  wholly  dissimilar  Midsummer 
Nights'  Dream.  The  youthful  Shakespeare  is  constantly 
making  the  change,  because  he  has  not  made  up  his  mind 
which  is  the  best  vehicle  ;  but  his  verse  is  equally  poetical 
in  both,  and  such  lines  as 

Fall  in  the  fresh  lap  of  the  crimson  rose, 
or 

The  summer  still  doth  tend  upon  my  state, 

want  no  rhyme  and,  in  the  first  case,  have  no  rhyme,  to 
bring  out  their  sweetness.  The  veteran  Jonson  wishes  to 
soften  his  verse  and  does  it,  but  only  by  the  help  of  the 
dulcifier,  of  which  he  knew  the  use  so  well  in  other  metres. 
Even  when  he  does  soften  the  blanks  themselves  a  little 
as  in  the  beautiful  Earine  passage  suggested  by  Martial, 
he  has  (after  the  first  line)  to  start  himself  with  rhyme.2 

1    V.v.     I  never  yet  knew,  soldiers,  that  in  fight 

Words  added  virtue  unto  valiant  men,  etc., 

with  the  splendid  touch  (where  the  use  of  redundance  is  noticeable)  towards 

the  end — 

Methinks  I  see  Death  and  the  Furies  waiting  • 
What  we  will  do,  and  all  the  Heaven  at  leisure 
For  this  great  spectacle. 

The  fine  description  of  the  battle  itself  by  Petreius  should  be  added. 

2  In  the  speech,  "A  spring,  now  she  is  dead,"  ten  lines  out  of  the  thirty 
rhyme.      Large  passages,  of  course,  rhyme  continuously. 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS  71 

Some,  it  is  known,  would  make  The  Sad  ShepJierd  his 
latest  thing ;  it  is  certainly  very  late,  and  this  taking 
refuge  in  rhyme  is  very  noteworthy.  But  an  even  greater 
instance  of  Ben  Jonson's  anticipation  of  the  second  half 
of  the  century,  at  the  very  moment  when  he  was  so 
largely  influencing  the  first,  is  to  be  found  in  the  other 
fragment — the  Mortimer  one — which  was  to  have  been  in 
blank  verse  with  choric  interludes,  less  purely  lyrical  than 
those  of  Catiline,  and  not,  it  would  seem,  entirely  unlike 
Samson  Agonistes.  A  slice  of  the  opening  tirade,  and  of 
the  short  conversation  with  Isabel,  which  together  make 
up  all  we  have  of  the  play,  is  given  below  with  a  special 
purpose.1  Unless  I  am  singularly  deceived  —  and  the 
impression  was  certainly  a  spontaneous  and  genuine  one, 
proceeding  from  no  precedent  theory  —  there  is  notice- 
able in  this,  as  in  the  work  of  hardly  any  other  really 
Elizabethan  writer,  even  Shirley,  that  curious  false  note 
which  pervades  all  our  modern  dramatic  blank  verse,  no 
matter  whether  it  be  Lamb's  or  Lander's,  Taylor's  or 
Tennyson's,  not  to  speak  of  that  of  living  persons.  It  is 

1       Mart.  There  is  a  fate  that  flies  with  towering  spirits 
Home  to  the  mark,  and  never  checks  at  conscience. 
Poor  plodding  priests,  and  preaching  friars  may  make 
Their  hollow  pulpits,  and  the  empty  aisles 
Of  churches  ring  with  that  round  word  :  but  we 
That  draw  the  subtile  and  more  piercing  air 
In  that  sublimed  region  of  a  court, 
Know  all  is  good  we  make  so  ;  and  go  on 
Secured  by  the  prosperity  of  our  virtues. 

Isab.   My  Lord  !     Sweet  Mortimer  ! 

Mart.  My  queen  !  my  mistress  ! 

My  sovereign,  nay,  my  goddess  and  my  Juno  ! 
What  name  or  title,  as  a  mark  of  power 
Upon  me,  should  I  give  you  ? 

Isab.  Isabel  ! 

Your  Isabel,  and  you  my  Mortimer, 
Which  are  the  marks  of  parity  not  power. 
And  these  are  titles  best  become  our  love. 

Mart.   Can  you  fall  under  those  ? 

Isab.  Yes,  and  be  happy  ! 

The  triumphant  arrogance  of  the  favourite  and  the  passion  of  the  queen 
are  both  fine.  I  agree  with  Whalley  (though  not  quite  for  his  reasons)  in 
regretting  the  loss  of  the  rest  bitterly.  But  I  think  the  extract  justifies  the 
text  with  the  exception  of  the  disjoined  "  Isabel — your  Isabel,"  and  that  is  a 
touch  of  nature  borrowed  from  nature  itself,  not  art. 


72  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

good  poetically  but  not  good  dramatically ;  it  is  evidently 
written  in  nature,  if  not  in  intention,  to  be  read  rather 
than  heard.  And  this,  which  declares  itself  so  strangely 
in  the  decayed  fragment  of  this  last  work,  is  probably 
what  has  really  been  the  matter  all  through.  If  we  were 
playing  the  old  children's  game  of  "  Animal,  vegetable,  or 
mineral  ? "  in  respect  to  Jonson's  prosody,  I  should  say, 
when  questioned  about  his  lyrics,  "  Animal,  and  of  all  but 
the  very  highest  animation  "  ;  of  his  couplets,  "  Vegetable, 
and  first-rate  vegetable";  but  of  his  blank  verse,  "  Mineral : 
weighty,  useful,  sometimes  brilliant,  but  not  alive."  l 

It  has  been  said  that  the  general  mark  of  Ben's  blanks 
is  not  exactly  ruggedness,  but  is  hardness.  On  the  other 
Chapman,  hand,  "  Georgius  Chapmannus  Homeri  Metaphrastes "  is 
nothing  if  not  rugged.  The  splendour  of  his  best  verse, 
both  in  meaning  and  in  a  certain  sense  of  poetic  expres- 
sion, is  undoubted — it  surpasses,  in  this  blank  verse  division, 
Jonson's  own.  Dryden's  earlier  judgment  was  better,  in 
some  ways,  when  he  approved  Chapman's  "  Delilahs  of 
the  imagination,"  than  his  later,  when  he  thought  them 
bombast.  Yet  they  are  bombast  ;  and  bombast  not 
smoothly  puffed  out  but  packed  and  stuffed  with  knotty, 
knarry  phrase,  jagged  in  outline  like  a  bag  of  nails.  His 
early  adherence  to  the  University  Wits,  and  his  disciple- 
ship  to  Marlowe  in  particular,  could  hardly  fail  to  give 
him  an  affection  for  the  single -moulded  line,  whether 
redundant  or  not,  and  for  mighty  words  rather  disdainfully 
cast  before  the  reader  than  complaisantly  prepared  for  his 
delight.  And  though  the  dates  of  his  work  are  not  quite 
certain,  we  can  see  this  general  mould  prevailing  from 
The  Blind  Beggar  of  Alexandria,  which  is  at  least  as  old 
as  our  first  certain  date  for  Shakespeare  (Meres's  mention 
in  1598),  to  the  very  late  and  collaborative  tragedy  of 
Philip  Chabot,  and  the  (if  we  take  them  in)  very  doubtful 
AlpJionsus  and  Revenge  for  Honour.  In  fact,  the  similarity 

1  It  ought  to  be  unnecessary,  but  I  fear  it  is  not,  to  observe  that  this 
judgment  is  altogether  ad  hoc.  It  must  be  supplemented  with  what  is  said 
on  the  other  poems,  and  even  when  thus  supplemented  it  must  not  be  taken 
as  a  judgment  on  the  whole  Ben.  There  are  few,  I  think,  who  rate  him 
higher  than  I  do. 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  " ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS          73 

of  the  versification,  especially  in  such  late  plays,  is  one  of 
the  main  arguments  for  the  usually  accepted  canon  of 
Chapman's  works.  It  may  be  studied  almost  anywhere 
with  fair  confidence  of  its  being  representative  ;  and  that 
being  the  case,  the  undoubted  centre  and  citadel  of  the 
position — the  Bussy  and  Byron  pieces — form  a  sufficient 
field  of  observation  for  those  who  do  not  care  to  under- 
take the  very  paying  trouble,  but  the  certainly  rather 
troublesome  process,  of  reading  Chapman  through. 

But  no  one  who  wishes  to  be  a  real  student  should 
omit  to  read  at  least  these  four  plays  through.1  The  great 
places  in  them  are,  in  the  first  D'Ambois  play,  the  account 
of  Bussy's  duel  with  Barrisor  ;  the  powerful  and  libellous 
passage  about  women  and  the  moon  ;  the  wild  rants  of 
Montsurry  when  he  discovers  his  disgrace  ;  the  famous 
incantation  passage.  In  the  Revenge,  Tamyra's  soliloquy, 
several  of  Clermont's  meditative  speeches  (though  some  of 
these  are  rhymed),  and  the  notably  Senecan  overture  of 
the  Fifth  Act  by  the  ghost  of  Bussy,  should  be  studied. 
In  the  Byron  pair,  attention  may  be  paid  to  at  least  a 
dozen  set  harangues  (for  this  is  the  most  sententious  of  the 
plays)  from  the  early  one, 

Now  by  my  dearest  marquisate  of  Saluces, 
onward. 

In  all  these  passages,  whether  the  subject  be  declamatory 
or  meditative,  the  structure  of  the  verse  is  remarkably 
similar;  as  may  be  seen  from  the  extracts  below.2  It  most 

1  The  Bussy  pair  are  now  accessible,  carefully  edited,  in  Mr.  Boas's  edition 
(Boston,  U.S.A.,  and  London,  1905).     For  the  others  and  the  rest  of  Chapman, 
the  three-volume  edition  (London,    1874),  which  contains  Mr.  Swinburne's 
famous  Introduction,  is  still  the  best  place  of  resort.      Some  have  specially 
compared  The  Gentleman  Usher  with  Love's  Labour's  Lost,  and  the  comparison 
is  not  unjustified  prosodically. 

2  (a)  (The  close  of  the  D'Ambois-Barrisor  duel.) 

Then,  as  in  Arden  I  have  seen  an  oak, 
Long  shook  with  tempests,  and  his  lofty  top 
Bent  to  his  root,  which  being  at  length  made  loose 
(Even  groaning  with  his  weight),  he  'gan  to  nod 
This  way  and  that :  as  loth  his  curled  brows 
(Which  he  had  oft  wrapt  in  the  sky  with  storms) 
Should  stoop  :  and  yet  his  radical  fibres  burst, 
Storm-like  he  fell  and  hid  the  fear-cold  earth. 

B.  d'Amb.  II.  i. 


74  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

resembles,  in  the  long  and  varied  phases  of  Shakespeare's 
blank  verse,  that  of  Romeo  and  Juliet,  where  the  "Wits" 
model  is  beginning  to  be  made  more  supple  and  springy. 
But  the  suppleness  and  spring,  which  even  there  Shake- 
speare attains,  are  not,  and  never  were  to  be,  within 
Chapman's  reach  ;  and  though  he  never  quite  fell  back  to 
the  stages  of  Andronicus,  or,  to  take  an  outside  example, 
of  Jeronimo,  he  is  always  suggesting  that  such  a  relapse  is 
possible.  At  the  same  time  he  has  preserved  or  recovered, 
as  no  other  dramatist  did  preserve  or  recover,  the  cloudy 
magnificence,  the  "  sulphurous  and  thought-executing  fire  " 
of  these  earlier  writers  ;  while  the  thought  itself  that  this 
volcanic  expression  executes,  is  Jacobean  instead  of 
Elizabethan — deeper  and  wider,  if  rather  more  artificial, 
than  Marlowe's. 

Marston.  Both  Jonson  and  Chapman  are  verse-smiths  in  such 
long  practice,  and  of  such  varied  exercise,  that  it  seemed 
worth  while  to  deal  with  them  in  some  circumstance ; 
especially  as  both  are  known  to  have  been  scholars  and 
critics  as  well  as  poets.1  But  most  of  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists,  even  some  who  may  claim  to  be  majorum 
gentium,  though  they  may  in  this  respect  provide  cobweb- 
spinning  for  the  thesis-writer,  hardly  supply  the  historian 
with  material  for  solid  work.  The  lessons  of  the  body  of 
their  production  are  invaluable ;  the  details  in  special 

(b)  (Women  and  the  Moon.) 

For  as  the  moon,  of  all  things  God  created, 

Not  only  is  the  most  appropriate  image, 

Or  glass  to  show  them  how  they  wax  and  wane  ; 

But  in  her  height  and  motion  likewise  bears 

Imperial  influences  that  command 

In  all  their  powers  and  make  them  wax  and  wane, 

So  women  that,  of  all  things  made  of  nothing, 

Are  the  most  perfect  idols  of  the  moon, 

(Or  still  unweaned  sweet  moon-calves  with  white  faces), 

Not  only  are  patterns  of  change  to  men, 

But  as  the  tender  moonshine  of  their  beauties 

Clears  or  is  cloudy,  make  men  glad  or  sad — 

So  thus  they  rule  in  men,  not  men  in  them. 

Ibid.  IV.  i. 

I   wish   there   were   room   to   quote  all   the   passages  referred   to  in   the 
text. 

1  Once  more  vide  chapter  on  "  Prosodists,"  and,  for  Chapman,  inf.  p.  1 1 1. 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETH AN"  DRAMATISTS          75 

cases  may  be  lightly  passed  over.1  We  know,  for  instance, 
of  Marston,  that  his  not  inconsiderable  work  was  the 
fruit  of  but  a  few  years  of  his  youth  and  earlier  manhood. 
The  couplets  of  his  boyish  satires,  though  extremely  rough 
in  language,  and  sometimes  almost  unintelligible,  by  no 
means  push  the  licence  of  prosodic  roughness  to  any  great 
extreme  ;  and  the  sixains  of  Pygmalion  are  almost  smooth. 
But  in  all,  the  line  has  a  tendency  to  be  singly-moulded  ; 
and  this  is  also  the  characteristic  of  the  blank  verse,  in 
the  plays  where  there  is  a  good  deal  of  prose.  It  is  not 
(the  caution  has  constantly  to  be  repeated)  that  the 
sense  does  not  often  overrun  ;  but  that  the  line-tension  is 
not  adjusted  to  the  overrunning.  He  does  not  by  any 
means  indulge  largely  in  extended  or  shortened  lines, 
generally  dropping  into  prose  when  he  leaves  off  set  verse. 
And  he  seems  also  to  have  a  positive  distaste  for  the 
redundant  syllable.  You  may  read  pages  on  pages  with- 
out finding  a  single  one  ;  and  when  one  comes  it  is  odds 
but  it  is  a  word  like  "  bosom,"  or  some  other  of  the  kind, 
which  almost  offers  to  shut  itself  up  into  a  monosyllable. 
It  is,  in  fact,  something  of  an  argument  (though,  of  course, 
no  strong  one)  against  The  Insatiate  Countess  being  his,  that 
redundant  syllables  are  rather  common  in  it. 

The  extensive,  and  in  great  part  delightful,  work  ofDekker. 
Dekker  is  so  much  dashed  and  brewed  with  collaboration, 
and  we  have  (excepting  the  lyrics  which  are  almost 
certainly  his,  and  which  will  be  dealt  with  elsewhere)  so 
little  non-dramatic  verse  to  help  us  in  distinguishing,  that  it 
is  very  difficult  to  speak  positively  of  his  blanks — especially 
as  the  editions  of  them  are  of  the  most  uncertain  character 
for  all  but  adventurous  theorists.  That  he  was  a  prolific 
prose  writer  we  do  know  ;  and  it  cannot  be  quite  for 
nothing  that  he  slips  into  prose  in  his  plays,  even  more 
easily  and  frequently  than  his  fellow  in  Ben's  black-books, 
Marston.  But  no  one  who  has  learnt  what  literary 
evidence  is,  can  be  otherwise  than  shy  of  basing  con- 
clusions on  (for  instance)  such  contrasted  facts,  as  that  in 


i 

give  it. 


In  giving  the  account,  that  is  to  say ;  not,  of  course,  in  preparing  to 
it. 


76  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

Old  Fortunatus  you  get  splendid  single  lines,  and  even 
passages  which  as  a  whole  are  splendid,  hitched  with 
breakdowns  which  are  quite  unaccountable ;  and  so 
with  all  the  rest.  Repeated  reading  of  Dekker,  now 
designedly  combined  with  reading  of  the  plays  in  which 
he  collaborated  with  Middleton,  Rowley,  Massinger,  or 
Ford,  now  taking  his  writings  as  a  whole,  and  now  passing 
to  theirs  as  wholes  likewise,  is  a  process  which  is  indis- 
pensable to  any  judgment  that  is  to  be  sound,  but  most 
likely  to  suspend  positive  judgment  altogether.  I  should 
say  that  Dekker  was  more  inclined  to  the  redundant 
syllable  than  Marston  ;  rather  given  to  drop  into  couplet 
and  even  alternate  rhyme  without  any  intention  of  keeping 
either  up ;  but  capable  of  rising  now  and  then  to  an 
almost  Shakespearian  weaving  of  a  blank-verse  passage, 
though  he  too  rarely  gave  himself  the  trouble  to  do  so. 
Webster.  Webster  is  to  some  extent,  and  only  to  some,  less  of 
a  puzzle  ;  for  though  he  probably  wrote  a  great  deal  in 
collaboration,  we  have  little  of  it,  and  his  practically 
undoubted  work  in  verse  is  substantial.  Nor  have 
we  any  certain  prose  work  of  any  size  from  his  hand. 
Discarding  the  batch  written  with  "  Thomas  Dickers," 
and  taking  the  four  plays  which  are  probably  his  own 
— The  White  Devil,  The  Duchess  of  Malfy,  The  Devil's 
Law  Case,  and  Appius  and  Virginia — we  find  a  differ- 
ence between  the  pairs  that  make  up  the  quartette. 
The  two  great  Romantic  tragedies,  infinitely  above  the 
others  as  poetry,  are  among  the  most  irregular  productions, 
prosodically  speaking,  of  all  the  great  age ;  the  others 
are  much  less  so,  and  Appius  and  Virginia,  whether  in 
compliment  to  its  classical  subject  or  not,  is  almost 
regular.  It  is  not  certain  that  this  is  not  accidental,  but 
it  is  at  least  remarkable.  Refining  further,  one  might 
say  that  The  Devil's  Law  Case  stands  nearer  to  the  great 
plays  than  to  Appius  and  Virginia.  This  last,  when  it 
is  not  prose,  is  fairly  regular  blank  verse  of  the  middle 
kind,  neither  as  wooden  as  the  earlier,  nor  as  limber,  and 
sometimes  limp,  as  the  later.  But  in  the  Devil  and  the 
Duchess  we  find  what  was  found  in  Dekker  more  notice- 


CHAP,  it     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS  77 

ably  still.  Save  rarely,  and  that  in  unimportant  as  well 
as  in  important  speeches,  the  author  seems  hardly  able 
to  rouse  himself  to  the  composition  of  even  a  miniature 
tirade  of  regular  verse.  Prose,  pure  and  simple  ;  verse 
which  is  half-prose,  or  itself  prose  a  little  versified  ;  and 
casual  snatches  of  pure  verse,  seem  to  serve  his  turn 
indifferently.  In  fact,  if  there  were  not  in  these  two 
writers  such  strange  soars  of  poetry,  one  might  sometimes 
think  that  they  were  not  poets  after  all — that  it  was  pain 
and  grief  to  them  to  write  verse,  and  that  they  shirked  it 
as  much  as  possible. 

In  Rowley,1  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  quite  unsafe  Rowley. 
to  suspect  little  or  no  liking  or  faculty  for  verse  at  all. 
The  chief  plays  attributed  to  him  2  without  a  collaborator, 
A  New  Wonder  and  A  Match  at  Midnight,  have  little 
verse,  and  what  they  have  is  of  a  most  pedestrian 
character  ;  while  he  generally  associated  with  persons  who 
had  demonstrably,  or  almost  so,  a  greater  faculty  for 
verse  than  himself.  Whether,  indeed,  it  was  quite  safe 
(as  was  done  some  years  ago  ingeniously  in  a  pretty 
book,3  and  to  an  effect  not  unpleasing)  to  carve  all  or 
most  of  the  verse  in  A  Cure  for  a  Cuckold,  and  set  it 
down  to  Webster,  I  have  doubted  considerably  since  I 
began  the  comparisons  necessary  for  this  inquiry.  But 
there  certainly  is  not  much  reason  for  setting  it  down  to 
Rowley,  while,  as  will  be  seen,  there  is  very  strong  reason 

1  William  Rowley.      His  namesake  Samuel  is  of  too  little  importance  to 
need  comment  here,   and   has  left  too  little   work   to  justify  any.      I   may 
perhaps  put  in  a  caveat  lector  against  the  practice,  common  with  the  wilder 
commentator,  and  not  quite  unknown  among  the  soberer  sort,  of  dogmatising 
on  the  authorship  of  parts  of  plays,  in  the  case  of  some  writers  from  whom 
we  have  little  and  undistinguished  original  and  certain  work.      The  almost 
frantic  folly  with  which  little  bits  of  this  and  that  play  used  to  be  dealt  out 
among  half-a-dozen  different  authors,  as  rapidly  and  surely  as  a  good  dealer 
distributes  cards,  has  indeed  rather  gone  out  of  fashion.      But  I  cannot  agree 
with  authorities  whom  I  respect  in  assigning,  for  instance,  parts  of  Timon  and 
Titus  Andronicus  to  such  a  person  as  George  Wilkins  on  prosodic  grounds. 
We  really  have  not  enough  to  go  upon. 

2  We    have    been    waiting,    not  quite  twenty  years,    for    Mr.    Bullen   to 
complete  his  second  series  of  Old  Plays  with  Rowley.      Seven  volumes  are 
good,  but  eight  are  better. 

3  Love's  Graduate  (Oxford  :  Daniel  Press,  1885),  executed  by  Mr.  S.  E. 
Spring  Rice  on  the  suggestion  and  with  the  collaboration  of  Mr.  Edmund 
Gosse. 


78  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

for  setting  most  of  the  verse  in  the  rather  numerous  plays 
which  he  wrote  with  Middleton  to  the  credit  of  this  latter. 
So,  too,  the  Dekker  and  Webster  collaborations  manifestly 
tempt  to  "  hariolation."  Westward  Ho  I  in  particular, 
with  its  immense  over- proportion  of  prose,  suddenly 
breaking  into  a  verse,  and  rather  fine  verse,  is  something 
of  a  curiosity ;  while  Northward  Ho !  after  an  early 
passage  (not  a  whole  scene)  of  passionate  verse,  is,  except 
for  a  few  cue-tags  and  the  like,  consistently  prose  to 
the  end. 

Middleton.  The  same  difficulties  recur  in  the  far  larger  work  of 
Middleton  himself,  except  that  we  know  that  Middleton 
was  very  much  less  of  a  prose  writer 1  (out  of  plays)  than 
Dekker ;  and  that  we  also  know  that  he  had  been  in  his 
youth  a  copious  practitioner  in  verse.  I  have  no  wish  to 
recant  the  censure  which,  twenty  years  ago,2  I  passed  on 
Microcynicon  and  the  version  of  the  Book  of  Wisdom, 
though  I  cannot  quite  agree  with  Mr.  Bullen  and  say 
that  it  is  "  the  most  damnable  piece  of  flatness  that  has 
ever  fallen  in  my  way."  The  flats  extend  behind  me  far 
too  widely  and  too  variously  for  that.  The  satires  are 
not  good  satires,  and  the  paraphrase  turns  an  admirable 
book  into  a  very  dull  one.  But  what  is  important  to  us 
is  that  neither  is  positively  bad  as  verse.  The  couplets 
of  the  Microcynicon 3  show  that  Middleton  adopted  the 
half-way  house  of  the  couplet,  neither  distinctly  stopped 
nor  distinctly  enjambed,  and  lived  in  it  with  ease.  Nor 
was  he  ever  at  a  loss  for  such  verse  in  his  nearly  thirty 
years'  usage  of  the  stage.  Some  couplets,  indeed,  in  his 
later  Triumphs,  etc.  (v.  inf.\  are  by  no  means  bad.  So, 
too,  the  sixains  of  the  Paraphrase,  however  "  wersh  "  they 
may  be  in  phrasing  and  expression,  are  by  no  means  of 

1  He  did  write  prose,  of  course. 

2  Elizabethan  Literature,  p.  267. 

3  The  opening  will   do  well   enough.      I   use,  of  course,    Mr.    Bullen's 
excellent  edition  (London,  1886) : — 

Time  was  when  down-declining,  toothless  age 
Was  of  a  holy  and  divine  presage, 
Divining,  prudent,  and  foretelling  truth, 
In  sacred  points  instructing  wandering  youth. 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS  79 

the  lowest,  or  even  of  a  very  low,  class  as  metre.1  They 
could  not  have  been  written,  as  they  were,  during  Spenser's 
lifetime,  and  not  so  very  long  after  the  second  instalment 
of  the  Faerie  Queene  appeared,  except  by  a  man  who  had 
either  given  very  considerable  heed  to  the  new  master,  or 
masters,  of  verse,  or  else  had  been  born  with  something 
more  than  an  average  faculty  for  it.  When  we  take 
account  of  this,  and  when  we  consider  the  facts  noted 
above  as  to  Middleton's  most  frequent  collaborators, 
Dekker  and  Rowley,  we  shall  be  in  a  position  to  judge 
the  probable  qualities  of  his  play-verse — not,  indeed,  with 
the  rash  dogmatism  which  has  been  so  often  indulged  in 
on  this  subject,  but  with  a  reasonable  hope  of  not  going 
too  far  wrong. 

And  we  do  accordingly  find  that  in  the  large  number 
of  plays  attributed  to  Middleton,  whether  alone  or  in 
collaboration,  some  hand  which  was  perfectly  facile  at 
blank  verse  is  at  work.  The  importance  of  couplet 
preparation  for  blank-verse  writing  is  beyond  all  question  ; 
and  in  plays  of  the  Blurt  Master  Constable  type,  in  which 
he  is  so  prolific,  and  which  in  others'  hands  tend  more 
and  more  to  prose,  it  seems  all  one  to  Middleton  whether 
he  writes  prose  or  verse  ;  though  even  when  the  theme 
seems  to  invite  prose  he  often  versifies.  In  fact,  his  case 
is  exactly  the  opposite  of  those  just  mentioned.  Webster 
and  Dekker  can  write  finer  verse  than  all,  save  a  very 
little,  of  his  ;  but  they  never  seem  to  write  it  with  ease, 
and  sometimes  make  most  botcherly  work  of  it.  He  has 
the  pen  of  a  ready  verse-writer,  and  by  no  means  of  one 
over  ready.  In  that  other  curious  class  of  "  strapped- 
together "  plays — where  a  comic  underplot,  generally  in 
prose,  is  simply  tied  neck  and  heels,  without  the  faintest 
attempt  to  secure  a  more  intimate  union,  to  a  tragic  plot 
in  verse — his  are  eminent  for  the  excellence  of  the  verse- 

1  Like  as  the  traces  of  appearing  clouds 

Gives  way  when  Titan  re-salutes  the  sea, 
With  new-changed  flames  gilding  the  ocean's  floods, 

Kissing  the  cabinet  where  Thetis  lay  : 
So  fares  our  life,  when 'death  doth  give  the  wound 
Our  life  is  led  by  death,  a  captive  bound. 


So  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

passages.  Besides  the  great  one  in  The  CJiangeling,  which 
nobody  need  have  refused  to  sign  : *  besides  others  in 
The  Mayor  of  QueenborougJi :  the  famous  loci  of  Women 
beware  Women  and  A  Fair  Quarrel  give  admirable 
illustration  of  Middleton's  blank  verse ;  as  do  things  yet 
different  in  The  Witch  and  the  Game  of  Chess  and  The 
Spanish  Gipsy.  On  the  whole,  however,  this  blank  verse, 
as  indeed  might  be  expected  from  what  has  been  said 
of  it,  is  rather  excellently  competent  than  excellently 
distinguished.  It  has  no  very  salient  characteristic  of 
its  own  ;  but  something  of  that  minor  universality  which 
brings  its  author  some  way  towards  Shakespeare  on  one 
side,  as  poignancy  and  humanity  bring  Webster  and 
Dekker  on  others. 

Heywood.  This  is  even  more  the  case  with  the  "  prose  Shake- 
speare "  ;  and  it  certainly  should  prevent  one  of  the  inter- 
pretations of  that  rather  idly  discussed  phrase  from  even 
suggesting  itself  to  any  one  who  knows  Heywood.  He 
is,  perhaps,  of  all  the  great  class  to  which  he  belongs,  the 
one  to  whom  it  seems  least  difficult  to  drop  into  fluent, 
easy,  not  very  distinguished,2  but  by  no  means  un- 
accomplished blank  verse.  The  impression  left  upon  me 
by  repeated  readings  is,  in  Middleton's  case,  as  I  have  said, 
that  it  was  as  easy  for  him  to  write  in  verse  as  not  ; 
in  Webster's  and  Dekker's,  that  it  was  not  so  easy  ;  in 
Heywood's,  that  it  was  easier.  There  is  of  course  plenty 

1  The  scene  between  Beatrice  and  De  Flores.      It  is  too  long  to  quote 
here,  but  I  may  observe  that  it  will  be  found  in  my  Elizabethan  Literatiire  (p. 
270  and  ff.)  at  only  a  page  or  so's  distance  from  the  long  passage  in  Vittoria 
Corombona,   made  earlier  famous  by   Lamb  (who  somehow  left  De  Flores 
for  the  less  exquisite  but  more  catholic  criticism  of  Leigh  Hunt   to  find). 
These  extracts,  which  would  together  fill  at  least  four  of  the  present  pages, 
will  show  better  than  any  snippets  can  do  the  remarkable  prosodic  difference 
between  these  two  great  acolytes  of  Shakespeare— Webster  fluttering  up  and 
down  from   lyric  soar  to  almost   prosaic   "  patter "  ;    Middleton   keeping  a 
steady,  though  by  no  means  monotonous,  flight  of  well-grasped  blank  verse 
with  the  occasional  couplet-tags. 

2  A  word   of  caution  on    the  use,   here   and   elsewhere,    of  this  phrase 
"undistinguished."     It  does  not  mean  that  there  are  not  in  almost  all  these 
dramatists  lines  and  sometimes  passages  of  extreme  distinction  as  poetry — 
distinction  which  is  not  wholly  unconnected  (as  indeed  it  never  can  be)  with 
prosodic  qualities.      But  in  these  cases  "  facit  inspiratio  versus."     It  is  not 
art  that  does  it. 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS  8r 

of  actual  prose  in  him  ;  but  there  is  a  great  deal  more 
verse  where  prose  would  do  just  as  well.  Everywhere — 
in  his  rather  pedestrian  chronicle -plays ;  in  the  wild 
jumble  of  farcical  songs  and  serious  dialogue  called  The 
Rape  of  Liicrece ;  in  his  endless  Ages  and  dramatic 
dialoguings  of  classical  mythology, — things  that  show  us 
better  than  anything  else  what  an  all-absorbing  and  all- 
returning  vortex  this  drama  was ;  in  the  travel -plays 
(again  symptoms)  of  which  he  is  the  best  master  ;  and  in 
the  domestic  dramas  of  which  Lamb  was  thinking,  and 
of  which  the  Woman  Killed  with  Kindness  is  the  chief, — 
in  all  these  the  characteristic  appears.  Heywood  has  a 
sort  of  tap  of  blank  verse,  not  at  all  bad,  which  he  can 
turn  on  at  any  time  and  the  cistern  whereof  never  runs 
dry  or  foul.  But  there  is  something  of  a  tap-and-cistern 
quality  about  it,  and  it  is  never  the  earth-born  and  heaven- 
seeking  fountain  of  Shakespeare. 

The  connection  between  practice  in  couplet  or  stanza  Tourneur. 
verse  and  "  blanks "  reappears  in  Cyril  Tourneur.  I  do 
not,  indeed,  recognise  in  him  that  quasi -Shakespearian 
variety  of  verse  which  some  have  seen  :  at  any  rate,  his 
variety  seems  to  me  a  variety  of  carelessness,  rather  than 
a  variety  of  art.  But  he  has,  to  a  specially  large  extent, 
that  "  versification  of  inspiration "  which  has  just  been 
referred  to  ;  and  it  is  doubtless  assisted  in  him  by  the 
practice  above  mentioned.  The  Transformed  Metamor- 
phosis, though  it  reads  almost  like  a  designed  parody  of 
the  most  extravagant  style  of  the  period,  and  though  its 
diction  is  an  undigested  mishmash  of  terms  which  would 
have  made  the  Limousin  scholar  embrace  Cyril  as  a 
brother,  is  very  far  from  being  bad  verse — is,  indeed,  here 
and  there  very  fine  verse.  And  the  enjambed  couplets  of 
the  Funeral  Poem  on  Vere  and  the  Death  of  Prince  Henry 
display  similar  capacity.  The  consequence  is  that  when 
he  will  give  himself  time,  he  has  not  the  least  difficulty 
(even  in  that  wild  nightmare,  the  Atheists  Tragedy,  much 
more  in  the  Revenger's]  in  producing  admirable  specimens 
of  the  more  rhetorical  and  pavanesque  blank  verse.  It  is, 
however,  noticeable  in  him  as  in  the  others  of  this  division, 

VOL.  II  G 


82  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

that  when  the  blank  verse  is  highest  the  couplets  are 
nighest — as  for  instance  in  the  fine  speech  of  that  "  ancient 
damnation "  Castiza's  mother.1  We  know  the  dividing 
line  in  Shakespeare  between  the  plays  where  he,  too, 
suffers  from  this  inability  to  keep  the  clue,  and  those 
where  he  does  not.  Of  most  of  those  with  whom  we  are 
now  dealing  it  may  be  said  that  they  have  not  passed 
that  line. 

Day.  One  who  has  certainly  not  passed  it,  but  on  the  contrary 
is  far  on  the  other  side — one,  for  all  this,  of  the  "  best 
versers  "  among  Shakespeare's  middle  contemporaries — is 
the  last  of  those  contemporaries  to  whom  we  shall  here 
give  specific  mention.  John  Day,2  the  author  of  The  Isle 
of  Gulls  and  the  Parliament  of  Bees,  can  write  blank 
verse ;  indeed,  the  people  who  like  such  things  might 
select  a  line  in  the  Beggar  of  Bethnal  Green — 

Eyeless,  handless,  footless,  comfortless, 

as  an  attempt  to  naturalise  in  blank  verse  the  "  Chaucerian 
acephalic,"  or  something  else  of  the  same  comforting,  if 
footless  as  well  as  headless,  terminological  kind.  But  he 
is  consistently  ill  at  ease  in  this  variety  of  numbers  ;  and 
though  he  writes  prose  fairly  and  frequently,  it  is  not  for 
prose  that  he  quits  them.  It  is  for  the  beloved  octo- 
syllabic and  decasyllabic  couplets  which  nearly  compose 
the  Parliament,  and  which  he  wields  always  with  facility 
and  sometimes  with  distinguished  grace.  But  it  is  not 

1  That    beginning    "Dishonourable    Act,"   Act    II.    Scene   i.,    of    The 
Revenger's    Tragedy    (Tourneur's     Works,    ed.    Churton    Collins,    vol.    ii. 
p.  47  :  London,   1878).     Most  of  Vindice's  own  harangues  and  soliloquies 
have  the  same  composite  character. 

2  Nobody  has  yet  superseded,  or  is  soon  likely  to  supersede,  that  edition 
of  Mr.  Bullen's  (London,  1881),  which  gave  such  pleasure  to  its  subscribers, 
and  gives  it  still.     But  the  Parliament  will  be  found  in  a  volume  (entitled 
from  Nero)  of  miscellaneous  plays  in  the  extremely  useful  Mermaid  Series, 
which  will  also,  for  the  more  important  single  authors,  to  no  small  extent 
serve  as   a  companion   to   the   present   survey.      Even   Lamb's  Specimens, 
however,  short  as  they  are,  will  illustrate  what  has  been  said  in  the  cases 
where  there  has  been  no  room  for  illustration  here ;  the  examples  in  that 
excellent  collection,  Knight's  Half-Hours  with  the  Best  Authors,  which  has, 
I  believe,  been  reprinted,  or  in  Chambers's  Cyclopaedia  of  English  Literature, 
still  better ;  and  those  in  Mr.  Williams's  Specimens  of  the  Elizabethan  Drama 
(Oxford,  1905),  best  of  all. 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS          83 

when  he  is  giving  himself  up  to  them  that  his  love  for 
them  is  most  remarkable.  He  cannot  keep  them  out  of 
blank  verse  itself.  I  think  it  would  be  very  difficult  to 
find  a  single  long  speech  of  Day's,  which  he  seems  to 
have  written  with  any  gusto  at  all,  and  which  is  wholly 
blank  ;  while  it  would,  on  the  other  hand,  hardly  be 
necessary  to  turn  over  more  than  a  page  or  two  to  find 
the  couplet  cropping  up. 

I  do  not  think  it  necessary  to  attempt  to  characterise  The  minors, 
the  prosody  of  still  lesser  writers  or  of  anonymous  plays  ; 
and  I  have  already  put  in  a  caveat  as  to  generalisations 
about  authorship.  But  there  are  generalisations  of  another 
and  much  safer  kind  which  this  process  fairly  validates,  and 
to  some  of  these  we  may  pass.  Of  the  writers  mentioned 
in  this  chapter,  and  of  the  much  larger  number  glanced  at 
in  the  last  paragraph,  Jonson  and  Chapman  stand  some- 
what apart,  for  reasons  given  already.  And  both  they  and 
some  others  lived  long  enough  to  be  affected  by  changes 
which  we  shall  see,  in  their  more  direct  and  exclusive 
subjects,  hereafter.  But  even  they,  to  some  extent,  and 
the  others  in  varying  but  much  greater  degrees,  exhibit 
some  general  characteristics  in  relation  to  prosody  gener- 
ally, and  blank  verse  in  particular,  which  we  may  now 
briefly  notice,  using  Shakespeare  and  the  remarks  already 
made  in  the  last  chapter  on  his  blank  verse  as  an 
admitted  standard  and  system  of  comparison,  not  as  a 
mere  excuse  for  belauding  or  belittling. 

In  the  first  place,  all,  or  almost  all,  represent  the  General 
literary  generation  which  saw  the  process  of  the  establish- 
ment of  blank  verse  as  the  dramatic  staple.  Only  Chapman 
could  claim  to  be  of  the  actual  conqnistadores  in  point  of 
date,  and  it  does  not  seem  that  he  began  drama  very 
early.  The  University  Wits  had  dropped  off  very  soon — 
except  Lodge,  who  was  the  least  dramatic  of  all,  it  is 
doubtful  whether  one  lived  into  more  than  the  first  year 
or  two  of  the  seventeenth  century.  Moreover,  when 
most  of  the  present  subjects  came  into  dramatic  work, 
"  our  fellow  Shakespeare  "  had  already  put  all  these  Wits, 
dead  and  alive,  down,  by  developing  blank  verse  itself  all 


84  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

but  to  its  full,  if  not  to  its  absolutely  full,  capacity.  But 
though  he  was  the  elder  of  most  of  them  in  years,  he 
was  too  much  their  fellow  to  impose  upon  them  as  a 
master.  Tourneur  has  been  thought  to  be  a  direct 
disciple  ;  but  I  should  rather  doubt  it.  So  has  Webster  ; 
but  in  that  case  Webster's  well-known  reference  has 
about  it  a  disingenuousness  which  one  does  not  somehow 
"  see  "  in  the  author  of  Webster's  works.  Hey  wood  and 
Middleton  are  in  the  precincts  of  Shakespeare,  but  not 
close  to  him  metrically  ;  the  rest  further  still  from  the 
prosodic  point  of  view.  And  I  shall  proceed  to  expound 
that  point  of  view,  only  repeating  the  caution  about  Ben 
and  Chapman.  Undoubtedly  Ben  wrote  his  blank  verse 
with  deliberate  art,  but  his  alleged  hankering  after  the 
couplet  is  a  precious  tell-tale.  And  the  ruggedness  of 
Chapman,  his  ineradicable  preference  for  cragginess  of 
speech  and  thought,  must  have  affected  every  metre  with 
him,  as  it  did,  till  it  was  half-liquefied  by  the  volcanic 
rush  and  volume  of  the  fourteener  and  of  Homer. 

The  others,  speaking  largely,  nowhere  show  a  greater 
contrast  with  Shakespeare  than  in  the  point  of  regarding 
blank  verse  as  an  art,  and  getting  the  utmost  out  of  it  in 
variety,  as  well  as  in  power  of  accomplishment.  It  is, 
except  perhaps  in  the  case  of  Day,  their  staple,  or  at 
least  their  staple  verse — the  main,  if  not  the  only,  wear 
prosodically.  They  show,  save  for  special  purposes,  very 
little  trace  of  a  desire  to  relapse  into  doggerel  or  four- 
teeners.  They  (with  the  same  exception)  use  coup- 
let only  for  a  change,  though  with  varying  frequency. 
Moreover,  they  are  not  rigidly  limited  to  one  form  of 
blank  verse.  They  know  and  occasionally  use  most  of 
its  varieties.  The  earlier  of  them — and  perhaps  all  of 
them  in  their  earlier  work — incline  to  the  single-moulded 
form,  are  not  very  lavish  of  redundant  syllables  or  tri- 
syllabic feet,  nor  very  skilful  in  the  verse  paragraph. 
But  in  more  or  less  degree,  with  more  or  less  intention, 
they  drop  into  all  these  things  at  times.  Yet,  in  regard 
to  the  capacities  of  their  instrument,  they  have  neither 
the  devotion  of  the  virtuoso  nor  the  keen  sense  of  results 


CHAP,  ii     OTHER  "ELIZABETHAN"  DRAMATISTS          85 

belonging  to  the  craftsman.  Some  of  them,  as  has  been 
noted,  use  it  with  a  sort  of  appearance  of  reluctance  or 
effort :  let  it  drop  willingly,  and  take  refuge  in  prose  or 
in  the  couplet  as  idiosyncrasy  may  suggest.  Some  of 
them,  as  has  been  noted  likewise,  have  command  of  it 
up  to  a  certain  point,  show  no  inclination  to  disuse  it, 
but  seldom  get  its  very  finest  tones,  and  hardly  ever  use 
these  tones  as  a  means  of  furthering  their  poetical  and 
dramatic  conceptions.  It  is  the  fashion  to  write  blank 
verse ;  they  write  blank  verse  ;  and  they  do  it  in  different 
measure  and  degree  pretty  well,  or  even  very  well.  But 
that  is  all.  It  is  with  them  nowhere  near  decadence, 
though  it  is  sometimes  short  of  accomplishment ;  but  it  is 
never  constantly,  or  for  any  length  of  time,  at  its  height. 

It  is  here  that  the  comparison  with  Shakespeare,  if 
used  in  the  right  way — for  instruction  of  prosodic  life 
and  example  of  prosodic  manners,  not  for  giving  prizes 
to  that  boy  and  stripes  to  this — comes  in  with  such 
effect.  In  most,  if  not  all,  of  these  writers  we  find 
passages  of  fine  blank  verse — passages  where  the  verse, 
and  even  the  particular  kind  of  verse,  contributes  un- 
doubtedly to  the  sum  of  poetic  achievement  reached  and 
of  poetic  pleasure  given.  But  this  part  of  the  work  is 
vague  and  indeterminate,  and  it  is  not  extraordinarily 
large.  We  scarcely  ever  (as  in  Shakespeare's  great  places, 
by  the  score  and  hundred,  we  can,  if  we  choose)  regard 
the  thing  as  what,  in  Fanny  Burney's  day,  musical  people 
called  a  "lesson"-— a  definite  accomplishment  of  art, 
inseparably,  but  not  quite  inextricably,  combined  with  a 
simple  appeal  to  the  gratification  of  the  senses  and  the 
intellect.  Extension  and  curtailment  of  line  ;  insertion 
or  omission  of  trisyllabic  feet  and  redundant  endings  ; 
variation  of  pause ;  enlarging  or  compressing  of  the  bulk 
of  the  poetic  clause  :  these  things,  of  course,  appear  after 
a  fashion,  because  they  cannot  but  appear ;  because  they 
are,  after  all,  the  natural  and  irresistible  prosodic  outlets 
or  mouthpieces  of  a  certain  sense  and  sentiment.  But 
they  appear  as  unpremeditated,  almost  as  if  accidental. 

So,  and   much  more,  we    find  comparatively   little  of 


86  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

that  concordat,  or  give-and-take,  between  prose  and  blank 
verse  which  is  perhaps  the  most  wonderful  thing  in 
Shakespeare.  As  we  noted  above,  there  are  passages  in 
Hamlet  (and,  for  the  matter  of  that,  in  most  plays  of  the 
period  of  perfection)  where  complete  blank  verse,  segments 
of  blank  verse,  and  positive  prose  are  dovetailed  together 
in  the  most  inconceivable  fashion,  so  that  you  never 
stumble,  but  always  glide  easily  from  one  to  the  other. 

Now,  that  is  exactly  what,  in  these  contemporaries,  or 
most  of  them,  you  do  not  find.  In  the  mixed  scenes  of 
some  of  them,  if,  again,  not  of  all,  the  verse  suggests  a 
sort  of  shame-faced  reflection  on  the  writer's  part — "  We 
really  must  pull  ourselves  together!" — the  prose  a  fit  of 
recklessness — "  Oh,  this  blank  verse  is  really  too  much 
trouble  ;  let  us  prose  it  for  a  while  !  " 

Still,  in  all  of  them  there  is,  be  it  repeated,  no  "  de- 
cadence "  ;  and  at  the  best  they  all,  or  nearly  all,  have  that 
indefinable  command  of  really  dramatic  "  blanks "  which 
has  never  been  recovered  since  Dryden,  or  perhaps  (for 
his  is,  in  the  main,  a  marvellous  galvanisation  of  the 
dying  thing)  since  Shirley.  The  characteristics  of  it,  or 
of  this  form  of  it,  will  be  best  summed  up  in  juxtaposition 
with  others  in  the  Interchapters  ;  but  we  have  here  given 
what  attention  seemed  proper  to  the  evidence. 


NOTE  ON  SHAKESPEARIAN  "DOUBTFUL" 
PLAYS 

I  HAVE  not  thought  it  necessary  to  discuss  the  prosody  of  the 
vague  and  floating  body  of  Shakespearian  "  Doubtfuls."  To  do 
so,  with  any  profit,  would  require  examination  at  least  as  full  as 
that  given  above  to  the  genuine  dramas ;  and  this  is  practically 
out  of  the  question.  Nor  do  any  of  them  raise  new  or  inde- 
pendent prosodic  questions,  interesting  as  the  prosody,  say  of 
Edward  III.)  may  be  in  itself,  and  as  bearing  on  the  authorship. 
To  distinguish  between  that  which  is  incumbent  on  a  historian 
of  English  Prosody,  and  that  which  properly  concerns  an  editor 
of  individual  works  or  writers,  has  been  one  of  my  chief  cares  in 
this  book. 


CHAPTER    III 

THE    CONTEMPORARIES  AND  FOLLOWERS    OF    SPENSER 
IN    STANZA   AND    COUPLET 

Retrospect  on  Spenser's  comparative  position — Dyer — Raleigh — 
Greville — Sidney — The  Arcadia  verse — Astrophel  and  Stella, 
etc.  —  Marlowe  —  Drayton  —  The  Polyolbion  —  His  narrative 
stanzas — His  couplet — His  lyrics — Daniel — Davies — Chapman 
— His  minor  metres — His  fourteener — Its  predecessors — Phaer, 
Golding,  etc. — Southwell  and  Warner — Chapman's  comments 
on  his  own  verse — Jonson — The  Fletchers — Giles — Phineas — 
Browne — His  dealings  with  Occleve — His  "sevens" — His 
enjambed  couplet — Wither — His  longer  couplet  in  "Alresford 
Pool"  —  His  shorter — Sylvester  and  Basse  —  The  Scottish 
Jacobeans — Ayton,  Ker,  and  Hannay — Drummond — Stirling — 
Note  on  the  Satirists. 

Retrospect  on  ALTHOUGH  the  point  was  carefully  guarded  in  the  last 
comparative  v°lume>  ^  may  be  well  to  repeat  in  this  that  the  separation 
position.  and  previous  treatment  of  Spenser  by  no  means  implies 
that  he  is  the  absolute  forerunner  and  conscious  pattern 
of  all  those  who  write  contemporaneously  with  him  in 
the  two  great  decades  from  1580  to  1600.  It  is  indeed 
certain  that  some,  and  probable  that  nearly  all,  did  receive 
at  his  "  noble  and  most  artful  hands  "  (to  use  Davenant's 
superlatively  felicitous  description  of  them)  the  gifts  of 
the  new  spirit  and  the  new  form  of  poetry.  But,  to 
a  very  large  extent  also,  the  spirit  and  the  form 
came  upon  him  and  upon  them  as  fellow  -  recipients ; 
though  he  had  so  much  the  largest  share  that  he  could 
dispense  to  others  as  well  as  keep  for  himself.  And  we 
are  so  much  accustomed  to  treat  him  as  something  remote 
and  afar,  even  from  the  great  company  of  these  contem- 
poraries— he  died  so  prematurely,  and  some  who  were  but 


CHAP,  in      SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS       89 

a  few  years  his  juniors  lived  to  experience  and  take  part 
in  such  different  phases  of  poetic  development — that 
perhaps  there  is  a  tendency  to  overlook  the  fact  of  the 
contemporaneousness.  Yet  there  is  no  doubt  that  Sidney 
and  Greville,  Raleigh  and  Dyer,  were  his  fellow-students 
rather  than  his  pupils  ;  although  Marlowe's  heart  of  flame 
must  have  been  kindled  by  the  Shepherd's  Kalendar,  it 
was  ashes  before  the  Amoretti,  and  Colin  Clout,  and  the 
two  great  Odes,  and  the  Four  Hymns,  and  the  last  half  of 
the  Faerie  Queene  itself  appeared.  While,  not  to  multiply 
instances  and  double  propositions,  Daniel  and  Drayton 
(probably  both  personal  friends)  had  done  much  of  their 
most  notable  work,  and  Davies  (not  improbably  a  friend 
also)  had  completed  almost  all  his  too  brief  performance, 
before  Spenser  died  on  New  Year's  Day  of  the  penulti- 
mate year  of  the  century. 

Of  the  four  whom,  as  we  have  said,  dates  and  facts 
generally  exclude  from  mere  discipleship,  all  but  one  give 
us  rather  less  to  say  in  a  History  of  Prosody  than  they 
would  give  in  a  History  of  Poetry.  Dyer's  few  and  Dyer, 
decently  famous  things  are  pure  lyric,  and  exhibit 
prosodically,  as  perhaps  otherwise,  the  old  respectable 
reformation  of  Turberville  and  Gascoigne,  lightened  and 
freshened  a  little  by  the  new  breath  of  fancy.  Raleigh —  Raleigh, 
who  actually  published  verse  before  Spenser  had  published 
any,  save  the  enigmatical  deliverances  to  "  Voluptuous 
Worldlings  " — exhibits  at  first,  and  retains  to  the  last  of 
his  too  scanty  but  intensely  interesting  and  rather  puzzling 
work,  a  certain  cerugo  of  antiquity.  If  he  wrote — one 
has  unluckily  in  so  many  cases  to  say  "if" — "As  you 
came  from  the  Holy  Land,"  he  had  the  dateless  ballad 
note,  as  it  is  alike  in  the  anonyms  of  the  fifteenth  century, 
and  in  Blake,  and  in  "  Proud  Maisie."  The  last  verses  in 
the  Gatehouse  blend  Donne  with  Sackville  in  certain 
tones,  but  add  a  burden,  an  "  underhum  "  which  is  that 
of  the  despised  vaunt-couriers  of  the  first  twenty-five  years 
of  Elizabeth  ;  and  there  is  the  same  in  "  The  Lie."  Once 
more,  Gascoigne  and  Turberville  would  have  written  it,  if 
they  could.  He  experiments  a  good  deal,  as  in  the 


go  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

curious  "  Fain  would  I,  but  I  dare  not,"  where  exact 
prosodic  arrangement  is  rather  optional,  though  its  general 
lines  are  clear  ;  and  in  the  strange  variety  (which  suggests 
well  enough  the  imagined  presence  of  the  Shadow  of 
Death,  though  that  presence  seems  actually  to  have  been 
set  back)  of  "  Give  me  my  scallop-shell  of  Quiet."  Cynthia 
seems  to  have  been  in  various  metres,  quatrains,  and 
tercets,  and  what  not,  including,  unless  the  copyist  has 
mistaken,  a  very  curious  section  of  Alexandrines  ;  while 
the  Sidney  epitaph  (once  more  doubtful)  gives  us  the  In 
Memoriam  quatrain,  but  with  decasyllabic,  not  octosyllabic, 
lines,  and  may  perhaps  have  suggested  to  Jonson  the 
happy,  though  by  himself  apparently  unvalued,  thought,  of 
razing  the  clumsy  galleon  to  a  gallant  frigate.1 
Greviiie.  Fulke  Greville 2  would  not  be  Fulke  Greville  if  he 
were  not  difficult,  at  any  rate  in  appearance  ;  and  his 
difficulty  extends  to  his  prosody.  There  are  flippant 
persons  who  have  asked  why  he  should  have  written 
Alaham  and  Mustapha  at  all  ?  It  is  certainly  not  flippant 
to  ask  the  question  why  he  wrote  these  singular  things  in 
such  a  still  more  singular  confusion  of  metre.  Not  only 
does  he  never  seem  to  know  whether  he  means  to  write 
blank  verse,  couplet,  terza  rima,  quatrain,  or  extended 
stanza,  but  it  may  almost  be  said  that  he  apparently 
seems  to  mean  to  write  them  all  at  the  same  time,  or  to 
have  written  the  things  separately  in  each  form  and  then 
made  a  sort  of  pot-pourri  of  the  variants.  Again  and  again 
one  form  seems  to  emerge  from  the  chaos,  only  to  vanish 
again.  The  intelligent  and  candid  Langbaine  shows  that 
he  may  (without  irony  this  time)  be  also  called  "ingenuous," 
by  observing  of  Alaham  that  "  'Tis  mostly  written  in 

1  Both  Dyer  and  Raleigh,  with  many  others,  will  be  found  in  Dr.  Hannah's 
admirable  Courtly  Poets,  more  than  once  printed  in  the  "  Aldine  "  series.     How 
easily  the   Sidney  piece  "shuts  up"  into  pure  /«  Memoriam,  the  following 
verse  shows  : — 

Drawn  was  thy  race  [aright]  from  princely  line  : 
Nor  less  [than  men]  by  gifts  that  nature  gave, 
The  [common]  mother  that  all  creatures  have, 

Doth  virtue  show,  and  [princely]  lineage  shine. 

2  Ed.  Grosart,  4  vols.      Privately  printed,  1870. 


CHAP,  in      SPENSEX'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS       91 

rhyme."  Tis  ;  but  in  rhyme  of  what  sort  it  would  have 
puzzled  the  amiable  Gerard  to  tell.  The  choruses,  on  the 
other  hand,  are  mostly  downright  "  poulter's  measure " 
here  ;  while  in  Mustapha,  the  dialogue  of  which  is  the 
same  jumble  as  that  in  Alaham,  they  take  various  stanza- 
forms.  These  stanza-forms  are  also  used  correctly  enough 
in  the  almost  equally  strange  "treatise"  poems  of  Monarchy 
and  Religion  ;  but  it  is,  of  course,  on  Ccelica  that  Brooke's 
prosodic,  not  less  than  his  poetic,  interest  rests.  Its 
"  sonnets,"  though  there  are  a  few  actual  quatorzains 
among  them,  adopt  that  form  so  rarely,  and  with  such  an 
obvious  absence  of  any  recognition  of  an  even  prerogative 
right  in  it,  that  they  are  better  not  classed  with  sonnets 
generally.  It  is  quite  clear  from  them  that  any  prosodic 
oddities  of  which  Greville  may  be  guilty  elsewhere  are 
merely  his  fun.  He  is  bound  as  an  Areopagite  to  try 
"  versing "  sometimes.  But  (and  this  is  really  funny  as 
well  as  instructive)  the  central  poetic  heat  which  he  had 
in  such  great  measure,  and  the  superficial  case-hardening 
of  obstinate  idiosyncrasy  which  he  had  in  no  less,  combine 
to  transform  the  thing.  He  tries  to  write  sapphics,  and 
in  lieu  of  the  abortions  or  burlesques  which  generally 
result *  from  that  attempt  in  English,  lo  and  behold  !  we 
have  a  really  lively  thing  in  true  English  metre,2  where 
the  natural  scansion  is  three  five-foot  iambics  with 
redundant  ending,  and  one  two-foot  ditto.  Since  the 
alliterative  rebels  capitulated  to  rhymed  stanza,  more 
than  two  centuries  earlier,  there  is  no  more  agreeable 
instance  of  the  triumph  of  the  right.  But  Brooke  has 
plenty  of  other  interesting  prosodic  things  in  this  charming 
collection — the  combination  in  which  of  strangeness,  sweet- 

1  Mr.  Swinburne's 

All  the  night  sleep  came  not  upon  my  eyelids 

is,  of  course,  the  great  exception.  But  the  least  unnatural  sapphics  in  any 
modern  language  seem  to  me  Carducci's  in  Italian. 

2  Eyes,  why  |  did  you  |  bring  un|to  me  |  these  graces? 
Graced  to  |  yield  won  |  der  out  |  of  her  |  true  mea  |  sure  ; 
Measure  |  of  all  |  joys  !  stay  |  to  fan|cy  tra|ces 
Model  |  of  pleajsure. 


92  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

ness,  and  strength  makes  it  more  fascinating  every  time  it 
is  read,  though  one  must  acknowledge  that  Brooke  leaves 
his  readers  to  do  a  good  deal  that  a  poet  is  usually  supposed 
to  do  ready  to  their  hand.  When  he  shifts  from  the 
sinewy  decasyllabics  of  his  opening  pieces  to  the  exquisite 
lightness  of  such  things  as — 

You  little  stars  that  be  in  skies, 

All  glory  in  Apollo's  glory, 
In  whose  aspects  conjoined  lies 

The  Heaven's  will,  and  Nature's  story  : 

when  he  breaks  out  into  that  astonishing  expostulation — 
I,  with  whose  colours  Myra  dressed  her  head  ! 

and  puts  fire  into  the  too  commonly  slow  and  languid 
sixain  ;  or  when  he  once  more  takes  the  lighter  and  more 
fantastic  touch  in 

Faction  that  ever  dwells 
In  courts  where  Wit  excels, 

Hath  set  defiance : 
Fortune  and  Love  have  sworn 
That  they  were  never  born, 

Of  one  alliance : 

when  he  helps  to  start  the  mixed  eights  and  sevens  which 
were  to  give  delightful  things  for  forty  years  to  come,  with 

In  the  time  when  herbs  and  flowers 
Springing  out  of  melting  powers, — 

in  all  these  cases  and  many  others  we  see  that  there  is 
more  than  experiment,  much  as  there  is  of  that — there  is 
achievement  also. 

The  great  achiever,  however,  as  well  as  the  great 
experimenter  of  the  group  is,  of  course,  "  Astrophel  "  him- 
self. He  appears,  with  all  his  graciousness,  to  have  been 
a  person  who  had  distinct  opinions  of  his  own,  and  was 
by  no  means  likely  to  be  led  by  anybody  ;  nor,  be  it 
remembered,  did  he  apparently  know  Spenser  very  early  ; 
nor  did  his  fancy  lead  him,  by  any  means,  in  exactly  or 


CHAP,  in      SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS       93 

nearly  the  same  paths.  By  the  date  of  Sidney's  death  Sidney, 
the  greater  poet  had  at  least  published  no  original  sonnets, 
he  had  quite  clearly  got  over  his  passing  fancy  for 
classical  "  versing,"  and  he  never  at  any  time  seems  to 
have  been  given  at  all  to  the  shorter  and  slighter  lyric 
measures.  Now  Sidney's  work  may  be  divided  almost 
completely  under  these  three  heads ;  and  not  merely  from 
this  fact,  but  from  the  much  less  precisely  definable  but 
really  more  trustworthy  aura  and  atmosphere  of  the  two 
men's  work,  I  should  judge  that,  with  whatever  understand- 
ing and  appreciation  of  each  other,  they  worked  almost 
independently,  though  almost  all  others  worked  more  or 
less  dependently  on  them.  For  this  latter  reason,  as  it 
affects  Sidney,  his  sonnets  and  songs  as  well  as  those  of 
Greville  may  be  separated  from  the  main  and  later  flower- 
heap  of  Elizabethan  sonnet  and  lyric,  while  the  interesting 
but  impossible  division  of  "  versing "  almost  necessarily 
finds  a  place  here. 

"  Interesting  but  impossible  "  ;  and  as  nobody  better 
than  Sidney  could  give  the  interest,  so  nobody  could 
better  expose  the  impossibility.  Spenser,  as  we  have 
seen,  "  cohorresced  and  evaded  "  early.  Sidney  had 
hardly  time  for  this  pusillanimity  ;  and  it  is  not  certain 
that  he  would  ever  have  shared  it,  for  the  Defence- 
Apology  shows  that  he  was  much  eaten  up  of  neo-classic 
delusions.  And  it  is  noticeable  that  the  rhythms  do  not 
in  his  hands,  as  in  those  of  his  friend  Fulke  Greville, 
suffer  a  happy  change  into  true  English  prosody.  They 
play  the  strict  and  lamentable  game. 

Indeed,    the    mixture    of   them    in    The    Countess    of  The  Arcadia 
Pembroke's  Arcadia?  with  other  things  equally  character-  ve 
istic  of  the  time,  makes  this  pretty  extensive   collection 
of  verse  one  of  the  main  points  de  repere  in  the  history  of 
English  prosody.     The  thing  could  not  have  been  done 
— at  least  by  any  one  with  a  quarter  of  Sidney's  critical 
and   poetical  genius — after   Spenser.      If   we  compare  it 

1  The  Arcadia  verse  is  most  conveniently  extracted  and  set  together  in 
Dr.  Grosart's  "Fuller  Worthies"  edition  of  the  Poems  (2  vols.,  1873), 
and  there  fills  some  180  pages. 


94  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

with  The  Shepherd's  Kaletidar  it  shows  us  clearly  how  far 
Spenser  was  ahead  of  and  above  his  friend  in  the  com- 
bination of  these  two  gifts.  A  quatorzain  in  poulter's 
measure  is  followed  by  an  ordinary  decasyllabic  one  ; 
that  by  a  decasyllabic  dizain  on  sonnet  (English  sonnet) 
principles  ;  and  this  again  by  a  sixain  similarly  arranged, 
but  in  octosyllabics.  Then  comes  a  song  ;  then  continuous 
Alexandrines  which  were  no  doubt  intended  for  classical 
iambic  trimeters,  and  which  dwindle  to  tens  admitting 
lyrical  admixtures.  At  last  Sidney  takes  up  "  the  burden 
of  the  South" — the  regular  classical  metres  themselves. 
And  which  are  the  worse,  Dorus  his  Elegiacs,  or  Zelmane 
her  Sapphics,  is  a  question  which  might  be  referred  to  a 
mixed  committee  of  Ancients  and  Moderns — say  Bavius, 
Codrus,  Sternhold  and  Hopkins,  with  Alaric  Attila  Watts 
for  chairman.  The  comparison  of  these  Sapphics a  with 
Greville's  is  really  most  luminous.  The  pair,  however 
(Dorus  and  Zelmane,  I  mean),  are  quite  satisfied  with 
themselves ;  and  proceed  to  an  enormous  dialogue  in 
pure  hexameters,  clattering  like  the  pans  and  the  pots  to 
which  Lockhart  (though  not  quite  in  that  sense)  compared 
Alaric  Attila's  own  verses.  Of  course,  Sidney  being 
Sidney,  there  cannot  but  be  some  poetry  even  here  ;  and 
much  more  in  the  native  or  naturalised  metres  which  he 
still  combines  with  this  unnatural  and  unnaturalisable 
"  rhythm  of  the  foreigner."  And  there  is,  of  course, 
always  the  delight,  the  "  rock  in  the  weary  land,"  of 

What  tongue  can  her  perfections  tell, 
or 

Why  dost  thou  haste  away, 

O  Titan  fair,  the  giver  of  the  day  ? 

and  the  like  after  the  grotesques.  But  both  divisions  are 
equal  documents  for  the  fact  that,  in  prosody,  Sir  Philip 

1  Thus,  not  ending,  ends  the  due  praise  of  her  praise. 
Fleshly  veil  consumes ;  but  a  soul  hath  his  life 
Which  is  held  in  love  ;  love  it  is  that  hath  joined 
Life  to  this  our  soul. 

This  is  either  very  bad  "  Needy  Knife-grinder,"  or  else  mere  prose. 


CHAP,  in      SPENSEX'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS      95 

was  still  Sir  Philip  the  Seeker ;  and  that  he  was  not  sure 
when  he  had  found. 

Yet  he  had  found,  and  greatly,  even  in  these  very  Astrophei  and 
Arcadia  poems  ;  and  much  more  in  Astrophei  and  Stella  stella<  etc- 
and  in  some  of  his  miscellanies.  There  cannot  be  much 
doubt  that  though  Wyatt  and  Surrey  introduced  the 
sonnet  into  English,  it  was  Sidney  who  made  it  popular, 
determined  its  form,  sowed  its  seed  broadcast  among  the 
fertile  poetic  soil  of  the  time.  It  is  not  necessary  to  lay 
much  stress  on  the  highly  respectable  argument  that 
Sidney  could  not  possibly  have  written  sonnets  to  a 
married  woman,  in  order  to  carry  the  date  of  the  Stella 
series  back  to  1580  or  earlier.  The  Fury  with  the 
abhorred  shears  herself  cuts  off  all  possibility  of  their 
being  later  than  1586  ;  and  by  that  time  nothing  of  any 
merit  in  the  kind  but  Watson's  Hecatompathia  had  made 
its  appearance.  No  doubt  Watson's  frigidity  helped  the 
vogue  of  this  incomparable  form  as  well  as  Sidney's  fire  ; 
but  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  Hecatompathia  pieces 
are  not  quatorzains  at  all,  though  the  Tears  of  Fancy  are. 
Here  also  Sidney  experiments  ;  he  cannot  help  it.  He 
uses  Alexandrines ;  and  at  least  tries  the  Petrarchian 
form.  But  in  the  main  he  is  a  true  English  sonneteer  ; 
and  we  shall  return  to  him  as  such. 

The  songs,  on  the  other  hand,  are  free,  and  almost 
make  amends  for  Spenser's  reluctance  to  enjoy  such 
liberty.  There  was  nobody  in  English,  not  even 
Chaucer,  from  whom  Sidney  could  have  learnt  the  art  of 
playing  on  a  word  for  its  sound  and  echo  as  he  does  in  the 
first  song  on  the  word  You  ;  and,  old  as  double  rhymes 
are,  they  had  never  been  made  to  yield  quite  such  sweet- 
ness. The  enclosed  rhymes  of  the  Second  ;  the  trochaic 
intermixture  of  the  Fourth  ;  the  dainty  "  sixes  of  six  "  in 
the  Sixth  ;  the  quaint  quintets  of  the  Ninth, — all  these 
things  show  that  English  prosody  has  entered  into  her 
kingdom,  and  is  exploring  the  riches  thereof.  And  out- 
side of  Astrophei  the  same  thing  is  shown  by  the  indignant 
concert  of  "  Love  is  dead,"  the  charming  Guitare  (it  is 
actually  "  to  a  Spanish  tune  ")  "  O  fair  !  O  sweet !  when 


96  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

I  do  look  on  thee," l  and  the  sober  rapture  of  that  other 
to  Wilhelmus  Van  Nassau?  He  had  found  ;  and  he 
taught  all  fit  seekers  how  to  find  likewise. 

Marlowe.  There  is  perhaps  no  more  extraordinary  instance,  both 
of  the  intrinsic  power  of  metre  and  of  its  strange  faculty 
of  adapting  itself  to  the  genius  of  the  individual,  than  the 
non- dramatic  verse  of  Marlowe.  Except  the  famous 
"  Come  live  with  me "  (which  has  more  charm  than 
character,  and  might  have  been  written  by  anybody  who 
could  have  written  it  at  the  time  when  it  was  written)  and 
a  few  doubtful,  or  not  doubtful,  epigrams  and  sonnets,  all 
this  verse  is  couched  in  the  rhymed  couplet — original  and 
gorgeous  in  Hero  and  Leander,  adapted  and  familiar  in 
the  Ovidian  Elegies.  In  both,  with  an  extraordinary 
unity  in  diversity,  the  character  of  the  verse  is  as  opposite 
as  possible  to  that  of  Marlowe's  "  blanks."  That  the 
quality  of  the  poetry  is  the  same  only  makes  the  thing 
more  interesting.  In  his  plays  Marlowe,  as  we  have  seen, 
though  he  discards  and  obliterates  the  mere  stump  of 
Gorboduc  (once  more  let  us  not  forget  the  contrast  of  this 
and  Sackville's  rhyme-royal),  retains  single-mouldedness  ; 
and  while  he  clothes  with  thunder  the  neck  of  his  charger, 
restrains  him  always  to  stately  paces.  In  the  poems,  at 
least  in  Hero  and  Leander,  the  verse  melts  and  ripples,  or 

1  O  fair  !  O  sweet !  when  I  do  look  on  thee, 
In  whom  all  joys  so  well  agree, 
Heart  and  soul  do  sing  in  me. 
This  you  hear  is  not  my  tongue, 
Which  once  said  what  I  conceived, 
For  it  was  of  use  bereaved, 
With  a  cruel  answer  stung. 
No  :  though  tongue  to  roof  be  cleaved, 
Fearing  lest  he  chastised  be, 
Heart  and  soul  do  sing  in  me. 

In  these  lines  iamb  and  trochee  play  cat's-cradle  together  quite  ravishingly. 

2  Who  hath  his  fancy  pleased 
With  fruits  of  happy  sight, 
Let  here  his  eyes  be  raised 
On  Nature's  sweetest  light ; 
A  light  which  doth  dissever 
And  yet  unite  the  eyes — 
A  light  which,  dying  never, 
Is  cause  the  looker  dies. 


CHAP,  in       SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS      97 

canters  and  dances  (whatever  metaphor  be  preferred)  with 
unceasing  mobility.  There  can  be  very  little  doubt 
that  this  most  fascinating  and  popular  poem  was  the 
instigator  of  Browne  and  others  in  the  relaxed  and  en- 
jambed  couplet  at  the  earlier  part  of  the  next  century  ; 
it  may  even  have  had  something  to  do  with  Thealma  and 
Clearchus  (if  Thealma  and  Clearchus  is  as  early  as  it 
ought  to  be  to  carry  out  Walton's  attribution) ;  and  good 
wits  have  thought  that  it  influenced  Keats  quite  as  much 
as  any  later  example.  The  couplet  is  more  distinctly 
enjambed  in  Hero  and  Leander,  more  often  (as  its  connec- 
tion with  the  elegiac  almost  necessitated),  stopped  in  the 
Ovidian  translations,  but  there  is  the  same  mobility  in 
each.  For  splendour  of  vowel -colour  and  music  the 
fragment  of  a  heroic  poem,  of  course,  stands  alone.1 

It  is  not  easy  to  exaggerate  the  prosodic  importance  Drayton. 
of  Drayton,  though  it  is  an  importance  very  difficult  to 
illustrate,  and  not  very  easy  even  to  estimate,  so  long  as 
we  have  no  complete  edition  of  his  immense  work  in  its 
proper  chronological  order,  and  with  its  unusually  numer- 
ous variants  of  correction,  substitution,  addition,  and 
omission.2  That  he  wrote  verse  steadily  for  some  forty 

1  Even  a  mere  scrap  may  show  this — 

On  this  feast-day — O  cursed  day  and  hour  ! — 
Went  Hero  thorough  Sestos  from  her  tower 
To  Venus'  temple,  where,  unhappily, 
As  after  chanced,  they  did  each  other  spy. 
So  fair  a  church  as  this  Venus  had  none  : 
The  walls  were  of  discoloured  jasper-stone, 
Wherein  was  Proteus  carved  ;  and  overhead 
A  lively  vine  of  green  sea-agate  spread, 
Where  by  one  hand  light-headed  Bacchus  hung, 
And  with  the  other  wine  from  grapes  out-wrung. 
Or  better  still,  but  shorter,  the  passage  in  the  second  Sestiad — 

Where  the  ground, 

Was  strewed  with  pearl,  and  in  low  coral  groves 
Sweet-singing  mermaids  sported  with  their  loves 
On  heaps  of  heavy  gold. 

2  The  only  thing  to  do  at  present  is  to  take  the  collection  (not  complete) 
in  Chalmers,  or  the  Spenser  Society's  issues,  with  Hooper's  Harmony  of  the 
Church  and  Professor  Elton's  Michael  Drayton  (London,    1905),  and  "com- 
bine the  information  "  as  best  may  be  done.      But  we  are  promised  a  com- 
plete issue  in  the  "Cambridge  Poets,"  which  have  already  completed  Prior 
and  Crabbe ;  and  a  good  collection  of  the  Minor  Poems  has  appeared  (ed. 
Cyril  Brett,  Oxford,  1907)  while  this  book  was  in  the  press. 

VOL.  II  H 


98  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

years  ;  that  he  had,  despite  his  sturdy  and  rather  re- 
calcitrant temperament,  a  singular  faculty  of  catching, 
and  even  of  anticipating,  the  aura  of  the  time,  so  that  he 
is  by  turns  representative  of  strictly  Elizabethan,  of 
Jacobean,  and  even  of  Caroline  poetry ;  that,  unlike 
many  voluminous  poets,  he  seems  to  have  been  not  in 
the  least  "thirled,"  as  the  Scotch  say,  to  one  particular 
metre, — all  these  things  are  in  his  favour  from  our  point 
of  view.  But  what  is  even  more  so  is  that,  as  in  the  poet 
who  was  born  just  to  succeed  him,  and  who  resembles 
him  in  so  many  ways — Dryden, — and  as  in  one  or  two 
others  of  the  difficult  class  between  the  absolute  "  Firsts  " 
and  the  unpromotable  "  Seconds,"  his  redoubtable  crafts- 
manship wrestles  with,  and  often  conquers,  in  this  respect 
as  in  others,  the  difficulties  over  which  his  mere  genius 
would  not  enable  him  to  prevail.  Like  nearly  all  such, 
he  seems  to  have  been  an  untiring  experimenter;  perhaps 
a  little  exposed  to  the  danger  of  those  who  have  the 
Ulyssean  indefatigableness  without  the  Ulyssean  astute- 
ness, and  who  therefore  persevere  in  experiments  promis- 
ing no  great  success,  but  in  this  very  point  infinitely 
superior  to  those  who  are  too  clever  to  dare  at  all.  It 
may  be  added  that,  at  one  time  at  any  rate,  Drayton 
was  a  very  popular  poet — though,  like  nearly  all  very 
popular  poets,  he  had  to  pay  later  for  his  popularity, — 
and  that  he  holds  a  great  position  in  what  was  the 
prosodic  business  of  the  early  seventeenth  century,  the 
question  of  the  couplet. 

One  of  his  experiments — about  the  most  daring  and 
the  most  sustained  forlorn  hope  in  all  prosodic  history — 
we  may  as  well  despatch  first.  One  seems  to  detect, 
even  in  some  of  Drayton's  few  but  faithful  champions,  a 
kind  of  wish  that  he  had  not  written  it ;  while  those  who 
are  not  the  elect  dismiss  it  (probably  on  very  slight 
acquaintance)  as  a  respectable,  or  not  even  respectable, 
monstrosity.  I  cannot  agree  with  either  of  these  views. 
In  some  moods  I  am  a  very  little  prouder  of  being  an 
The  Englishman  than  I  should  have  been  if  the  Polyolbion 

.  did  not  exist — jf  the  M  strange  Herculean  task,"  so  worthy 


CHAP,  in       SPENS£1?S  FELLO WS  AND  FOLLOWERS      99 

in  itself  of  any  Hercules,  had  been  grappled  with  in  a 
less  Herculean  manner.  But,  speaking  as  a  mere  pros- 
odist,  I  must  of  course  confess  that  the  continuous 
Alexandrine,  seriously  treated  at  very  great  length,  is  an 
impossible  metre  in  English.1  I  do  not  believe  that  any 
line  longer  than  a  fairly  elastic  decasyllabic  will  do  as 
such  a  vehicle  in  our  language  :  unless,  indeed,  it  be  the 
old  fourteener.  For  there  is  nothing  of  which  English 
is  so  impatient  as  monotony,  or  of  which  it  is  so  avid  as 
variety.  If  you  pause  the  Alexandrine  exactly  at  the 
middle,  you  cannot  escape  monotony  ;  and  if  you  attempt 
a  variable  pause,  "  sixes  and  sevens,"  literally  as  well  as 
metaphorically,  will  be  the  result.  Whether  any  poet 
has  ever  tried  equivalenced  Alexandrines  copiously  and 
with  success,  I  do  not  at  present  remember  ;  but  I  should 
not  augur  well  of  the  experiment. 

At  the  same  time,  I  am  bound  to  say  that  it  is  not 
impossible  to  establish  a  "  Polyolbion  habit,"  in  which,  as 
the  medical  persons  say,  this  Alexandrine  is  well  borne. 
You  must  observe  caesura  in  reading  ;  but  it  becomes  by 
degrees  as  tolerable  as  that  of  the  Popian  couplet,  if  not 
a  little  more  so,  and  is  certainly  not  much  more  mono- 
tonous. In  consequence,  probably,  of  the  hugeness  of  his 
task,  which  precluded  nicety  of  revision,  Drayton  has  not 
always  distributed  prosodic  phrase  as  happily  as  he  might ; 
for  instance,  the  two  halves — 

Her  brave  Pegasian  steed 
The  wonder  of  the  West, 

(for  the  Berkshire  White  Horse)  would  have  made  an 
admirable  line  if  put  together.  But  he  has  often  done 
this  ;  and  if  his  selection  was  originally  wrong,  it  was 
non  ingratus  error? 

1  Sidney's  Alexandrines  (the  chief  examples  that  may  be  quoted  against 
me  at  this  time)  do  not  run  to  any  great  length.      For  the  reasons  of  its  better 
success  in  Fifine  at  the  Fair  we  may  wait  till  we  come  to  that  poem. 

2  Here  is  a  fairly  average  specimen  : — 

Whenas  the  pliant  Muse,  with  fair  and  even  flight, 
Betwixt  her  silver  wings  is  wafted  to  the  Wight, — 
That  Isle,  which  jutting  out  into  the  sea  so  far, 
Her  offspring  traineth  up  in  exercise  of  war  ; 


loo  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

His  narrative  Not  a  great  deal  need  be  said  of  the  octaves,  in  which 
stanzas.  ^6,  like  Daniel,  couched  his  principal  "  history,"  The 
Barons'  Wars,  and  in  which  he  also  wrote  some  of  the 
minor  ones — The  Miseries  of  Queen  Margaret,  The  Battle 
(to  be  most  sedulously  distinguished  from  the  Ballad}  of 
Agincourt,  etc.  ;  or  of  the  rhyme-royal  of  others — Robert 
Duke  of  Normandy,  Matilda  the  Fair,  etc.  ;  or  of  the  sixains 
of  yet  others.  Spenser  had  once  for  all  taught  poets 
who  were  teachable  the  outward  form  and  fashion  of 
these  things — had  supplied  them  with  the  perfect  art  of 
poetical  bottle-making  in  stanzas.  They  had  to  fill  the 
bottles  with  their  own  wine,  of  course,  and  the  vintages 
and  growths  differed.  But,  as  a  rule,  they  ran  the  bottles 
themselves  into  very  much  the  same  moulds.  Drayton 
(whose  special  interest  as  a  conscious  prosodist  will  occupy 
us  later)  seems  to  me  to  have  been  least  happy  in  these 
numbers ;  they  encouraged  his  tendency  to  be  prosaic 
in  a  different  fashion  from  that  in  which  they  encouraged 
Daniel's,  but  to  much  the  same  degree.  It  is,  no  doubt, 
wrong ;  but  I  can  never  open  The  Miseries  of  Queen 
Margaret  without  having  in  mine  ear  certain  blank-verse 
lines  written  perhaps  not  so  long  before  by  (as  I  feel 
sure)  another  Warwickshire  man — 

I  called  thee  then,  vain  shadow  of  my  fortune. 

And  I  find  it  difficult  to  read  flat  octaves  that  day  any 
more.  But  flatness  and  Drayton  are,  fortunately,  only 
occasional  companions.  She  comes  on  him  when  he  is 

Weary,  forswat,  and  vill  of  vayn 

Those  pirates  to  put  back,  that  oft  purloin  her  trade, 

Or  Spaniards  or  the  French  attempting  to  invade. 

Of  all  the  southern  isles  she  holds  the  highest  place, 

And  evermore  hath  been  the  great'st  in  Britain's  grace. 

Not  one  of  all  her  nymphs  her  sovereign  fav'reth  thus, 

Embraced  in  the  arms  of  old  Oceanus. 

For  none  of  her  account  so  near  her  bosom  stand, 

'Twixt  Penwith's  furthest  point  and  Goodwin's  queachy  sand. 

Drayton,  as  in  this  last  line,  often  manages  his  frequent  proper  names  with 
great  skill.  I  think  Macaulay  learnt  the  trick  for  The  Armada  from  him,  as 
well  as  from  ^Eschylus. 


CHAP,  in     SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     101 

at  dogged  task-work  ;  but  he  shakes  her  off  when  he  is 
himself.  It  is  in  his  couplet  and  his  numerous  lyrical 
experiments  that  his  great  prosodic  value  and  interest 
lie,  and  to  these  we  may  now  turn. 

His  importance  in  the  couplet  has  been,  and  must  His  couplet. 
always  be,  more  and  more  recognised  the  more  he  is 
studied  ;  but  there  are  few  points  on  which  the  promised 
complete  edition,  with  various  readings  and  forms,  is 
more  required.  In  Idea,  The  Shepherd's  Garland  (as  later 
entitled,  Pastorals  containing  Eclogues],  there  are  no 
pieces  wholly  in  couplet,  but  there  are  several  in  stanzas 
with  final  couplet  Now  this,  as  has  been  and  will  be 
said  and  seen,  always  acts  as  an  encouragement,  some- 
times a  very  strong  encouragement,  to  closing  the  form. 
And  the  Legend  of  Gaveston,  which  is  possibly  of  1593, 
the  year  of  the  death  of  Marlowe,  and  two  years  after 
Spenser's  Complaints  with  Mother  Hubberd,  is  again  in 
such  a  stanza — sixains  this  time.  The  final  couplets 
here  are  usually  sententious  and  self-enclosed ;  but  they 
often  have  double  rhymes,  which  tends  towards  enjamb- 
ment  Matilda,  which  follows,  extends  itself  to  rhyme- 
royal,  and  here  the  couplet  again  dogs  the  step.  So  it 
does  even  in  the  sonnets  of  Idea.  And  so  again  the 
rhyme -royal  of  Mortimer iados,  the  first  version  of  The 
Barons'  Wars,  was  expanded  into  octave  in  the  second, 
and  the  couplet  of  the  octave  is  of  all  the  most  insinuat- 
ing, if  not  positively  self- imposing.  (Is  there  anything 
in  the  fact  that  Fairfax  came  between  ?)  And  though 
the  new  legend,  Robert  of  Normandy,  which  accompanied 
Matilda  and  Gaveston  in  1596,  is  in  rhyme-royal,  ecce 
iterum  the  couplet.  Meanwhile  he  had  actually  tried  it 
by  itself  in  a  poem  (which  he  never  re-issued,  though  he 
used  parts  of  it  in  The  Man  in  the  Moon,  and  which  is 
not  to  be  found  in  the  most  accessible  editions  of  his 
works),  Endimion  and  Phoebe.  There  is  no  doubt  that  Mr. 
Elton  is  right  in  associating  this  with  Hero  and  Leander. 
Even  without  Drayton's  known  and  attested  admiration 
for  Marlowe,  it  would  be  certain.  But  there  is  here  much 
less  tendency  to  enjambment,  and  when  Drayton  returned 


102  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

to  the  metre  in  England's  Heroical  Epistles  there  was  less 
still.  He  is  constantly  emphatic,  and  not  seldom  posi- 
tively antithetic.  Now,  emphasis  and  antithesis  are  the 
certain  begetters  of  closure.  And  always  he  held  nearer 
to  this  closed  model  than  to  the  other,  though  you  may 
find  things  in  him  that  might  almost  be  Waller,  and 
things  that  might  almost  be  Browne,  for  date  and 
character  combined. 

His  lyrics.  He,  however,  like  Jonson  and  not  a  few  others,  is  an 
instance  of  how  easily  sturdy  and  even  rugged  natures 
can  adjust  themselves  to  the  lightest  and  most  delicate 
versification.  Apparently,  when  he  resolved  to  write  the 
Polyolbion,  he  wisely  determined,  being  already  provided 
with  the  famous  "  something  craggy  to  break  his  mind 
upon,"  to  provide  himself  likewise  with  something  flowery 
on  which  to  rest  it.  As  Mr.  Elton  says,  his  lyric  gift 
came  late,  but  the  light  of  the  eventide  was  coloured  fair. 
The  Odes,  the  Muses'  Elizium,  Nymphidia,  and  the  other 
poems  which  he  wrote  in  lighter  measures  during  the  last 
five-and-twenty  years  of  his  life,  are  very  charming  things, 
and  hardly  more  than  one  of  them  can  be  said  to  be 
known  as  it  deserves.  How  much  the  measure  has  to 
do  with  the  admirable  excellence  of  the  Ballad  of  Agin- 
court  need  only  be  urged  upon  persons  who  are  incapable 
of  understanding  what  is  urged  on  them.  Out  of  the 
drama,  poets  were  at  this  time  so  very  shy  of  trisyllabic 
feet,  especially  as  regular  things,  that  one  at  once  sees 
Drayton's  mastery  and  independence,  while  no  fit  reader 
has  ever  missed  the  triumph  of 

Ferrers  and  Fanhope.1 

But  Drayton  has  plenty  more  things  besides  this  for 
bow  and  lyre.      He  is  still  in  the  period  of  experiment, 

1  I  do  not  think  I  need  apologise  very  much  for  occasionally  suggesting 
"  off"  prosodic  considerations  to  my  readers.  Some  of  them  may  like  to 
contrast  the  Ballad  with  Carducci's  Satana.  I  need  not  "  sign-post "  the 
agreements  and  differences.  Of  course  Carducci  did  not  introduce  this  metre, 
which  is  an  old  one  in  Italy.  In  fact,  Mitford  long  ago  actually  compared 
Drayton  (in  the  "Sirena"  piece)  and  Metastasio,  though,  I  regret  to  say,  with 
not  a  little  misunderstanding  of  the  English  beauty. 


CHAP,  in     SPENSE&S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     103 

and  sometimes  he  strikes  them  into  jangle,  but  very 
seldom.  His  lyrical  "  Why  not  ?  "  l  is  not  the  happiest 
piece  of  verse,  and  he  should  not  have  praised  that 
dreadful  person  Soothern.  But  'tis  astonishing  how 
much  pleasanter  it  is  to  hear  a  good  writer  praise  a  bad 
one  than  to  hear  a  bad  writer  blame  a  good !  The 
splendid  "  New  Year," 2  where  Mr.  Elton  has  not  failed  to 
notice  a  Swinburnian  touch ;  the  pretty  "  Valentine " 
(many  good  things  went  out  with  St.  Valentine)  ;  "  The 
Heart " 3  (could  he  possibly  have  known  Alexander 
Scott  ?) ;  "  The  Virginia  Voyage,"  4  even  the  Skeltonics,5 

1  And  why  not  I,  as  he 
That's  greatest,  if  as  free 

(In  sundry  strains  that  strive 
Since  there  so  many  be), 
The  old  lyric  kind  revive  ? 

I  will :  yea,  and  I  may. 
Who  shall  oppose  my  way  ? 

For  what  is  he  alone, 
That  of  himself  can  say, 

He's  heir  of  Helicon  ? 

2  Rich  statue,  double-faced, 
With  marble  temples  graced, 

To  raise  thy  godhead  higher, 
In  flames  where  altars  shining 
Before  thy  priests  divining 

Do  od'rous  flames  expire. 

Give  her  tW  Eoan  brightness 
Winged  with  that  subtle  lightness 

That  doth  transpierce  the  air ; 
The  roses  of  the  morning 
The  rising  heaven  adorning 

To  mesh  -with  flames  of  hair. 

3  If  thus  we  needs  must  go, 
What  shall  our  one  heart  do, 
This  one  made  of  our  two  ? 

4  Britons  !  you  stay  too  long, 
Quickly  aboard  bestow  you, 
And  with  a  merry  gale 
Swell  your  stretched  sail, 
With  vows  as  strong 

As  winds  that  blow  you. 

5  The  Muse  should  be  sprightly, 
Yet  not  handling  lightly 
Things  grave,  etc. 


104  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

are  all  documents  for  us  of  the  paradise  of  lyric  song  that 
was  to  atone  for  other  not  at  all  paradisaical  things  in 
England  for  the  next  fifty  years.  And  there  are  delightful 
things  in  the  "  Nymphals  "  of  the  Muses'  Elizium — a  use 
of  the  common  measure  not  quite  reaching  the  ineffableness 
which  was  (perhaps  had  been  already)  introduced  by  Ben 
or  Donne,  but  a  form  of  its  own,  quietly  musical — and  the 
curious  variation  on  the  Agincourt  measure  in  the  duet 
between  Nais  and  Cloe.1  Above  all  things, 

Near  to  the  silver  Trent 
Sirena  dwelleth, 

exhibits  the  old  trick  of  knapping  verses  sweetly  as  few 
other  things  do.  And  as  for  Nymphidia,  who  shall  over- 
praise the  inimitable  lightness  and  childishness  of  its 
rippling  melody  ?  It  is  burlesque,  of  course  ;  there  is  no 
witchery  about  it,  and  its  figures  are  rather  puppets 
than  fairies,  and  so  want  puppet  music.  But  prettier 
marionettes  you  shall  hardly  find,  nor  a  prettier  "marionette 
symphony  "  for  them  to  dance  to. 

Daniel.  Daniel  and  Davies,  the  two  poets  who  are  in  many 
ways  closest  to  Drayton,  require  rather  less  notice  in  this 
place :  first,  because  their  practice  is  a  good  deal  less  varied 
than  his  ;  and  secondly,  because  their  even  excellence  in 
this  respect  rather  deserves  encomium  than  necessitates 
examination.  The  name  of  Daniel  is  indeed  clear  and 
venerable  in  the  history  of  English  prosody  ;  but  mainly 
on  account  of  the  prose-tractate  which  will  be  noticed 
later  in  its  proper  place,  as  will  be  his  sonnets  with  their 
kind.  Otherwise  he  is  chiefly  noticeable  as  having  (he 
was  of  the  Sidneian  family,  as  they  said  then)  almost  at 
once  caught  the  great  lesson  of  prosody  which  Spenser 
had  taught.  But  the  extreme  sobriety  of  Daniel's  genius 
made  it  easier  for  him  to  be  orderly  than  to  be  anything 
more.  The  octave,  which  is  his  vehicle  in  the  History  of 

1  Nais  says — 

Cloe,  I  scorn  my  rhyme 
Should  observe  feet  or  time  : 
Now  I  fall,  now  I  climb — 
What  is't  I  dare  not  ? 


CHAP,  in      SPENSEtfS  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     105 

the  Civil  War,  and  to  which  he  recurs  with  evident 
predilection  in  other  places,  is  accomplished  enough  ;  but 
it  is  rarely  inspired  or  inspiring.  The  triumph  of  it — 
the  one  really  magnificent  thing  that  Daniel  did,  in  the 
lines  to  the  Countess  of  Cumberland — 

He  that  of  such  a  height  has  built  his  mind, 

comes  from  the  singular  coincidence  of  stately  quietism 
in  verse  and  thought  He  has  to  modulate  a  theme 
which  would  be  almost  as  effective  unmodulated,  and  he 
does  it  splendidly  ;  but  the  process  is  rather  rhetorical 
than  poetical.1  He  can  and  does';  derive  from  his  sonnet 
practice  tender  and  more  strictly  poetic  notes,  as  in  the 
opening  line  of  the  Lady  Anne  Clifford  poem — 

Unto  the  tender  youth  of  those  fair  eyes, 

where  the  adjustment  of  "  tender "  and  "  fair "  has  the 
secret  ;  he  can  be  suddenly  fulminant,  as  in  the  line  which 
Wordsworth  "  lifted  "  like  a  Borderer  as  he  was — 

Sacred  religion  !  mother  of  form  and  fear.2 

He  can  write  good  rhyme-royal  and  good  sixes,  and  we 
may  be  able  to  recur  to  his  few  lyrics.  But  on  the  whole, 
prosodically  speaking,  he  is  more  generally  adequate  than 
anything  else.  Now  adequacy  is  good,  but  it  is  not 
delicious. 

With  regard  to  Sir  John  Davies  it  ought  never  to  be  Davies. 
forgotten  that  his  poetical  work  is  the  product  of  only  a 
few1  years  of  his  youth.8  When  this  is  remembered  it 
may  perhaps  be  allowed  that,  for  prosodic  practice,  he 
ranks  higher  than  Daniel.  Indeed,  of  the  three  works  by 
which  he  is  chiefly  known,  two  have  a  prosodic  originality 
which  cannot  but  make  one  think  that  if  Davies  had 
been  in  the  conditions  of  Drayton  he  would  have  been 

1  Perhaps  in  connection  with  this  he  altered  the  rhyme  scheme  to  abcabcdd, 
so  that  each  stanza  starts  with  a  blank-verse  effect. 

'*  There  are  others  hardly  less  good  than  this  in  the  original  Musophilus. 

3  Orchestra  ( 1 594)  was  written  before  he  was  five-and-twenty ;  all  the 
rest  before  the  Queen's  death,  when  he  was  not  thirty-five. 


106  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

at  least  as  important  for  us,  and  perhaps  more  so. 
Orchestra — that  whimsical,  but  by  no  means  frivolous 
fragment,  which  combines  the  information  of  two  very 
different  kinds  of  "  Academy " — is  in  rhyme-royal  of  a 
most  excellent  pattern,  less  solemn  and  plangent  (indeed 
solemnity  and  plangency  were  here  required,  the  first  but 
little,  and  the  last  not  at  all)  than  Sackville's,  but  as 
resonant,  flexible,  and  full.  Two  of  its  own  lines — 

So  subtle  and  so  curious  was  the  measure 
With  so  unlooked-for  change  in  every  strain, 

may  almost  be  applied  to  it.  That  the  more  Spenserian 
Nosce  Teipsum  should  be  in  quatrains  is  again  a  very 
interesting  prosodic  fact  at  this  early  period.  And  it  is 
by  no  means  clear  that  the  metre  does  not  here,  to  some 
extent,  justify  itself  against  the  objections  which  will  be 
brought  elsewhere  against  it  as  practised  by  Davenant, 
and  even  by  Dryden.  It  never  can  be  a  good  vehicle  of 
narration,  but  if — if — theological-philosophical  argument 
is  ever  to  be  put  into  verse  at  all,  this  sententious,  not 
inharmonious,  not  too  involved  or  too  scrappy  vehicle 
seems  good  for  it.  Still,  to  see  what  a  verse-smith  Davies 
was  we  have  chiefly  to  look  to  Astrcea,  where  the  pervad- 
ing acrostic  "  Elizabetha  Regina "  is  wrought  into  two 
fives  and  a  six  of  almost  Caroline  quaintness  and  elegance 
combined.  It  is  no  wonder  that  Sir  John  should  have 
been  fond  of  dancing,  which  is  indeed  very  close  to 
prosody,  and  like  it  may  be  much  assisted  by,  but  is  by 
no  means  to  be  dictated  to,  by  music.  On  this  point  he 
went  a  little  wrong  in  Orchestra  itself,  but  excusably,  for 
he  never  finished  or  reviewed  that  poem.1 

1  Who  doth  not  see  the  measures  of  the  moon, 
Which  thirteen  times  she  danceth  every  year  ? 
And  ends  her  pavin  thirteen  times  as  soon 
As  doth  her  brother,  of  whose  golden  hair 
She  borroweth  part,  and  proudly  doth  it  wear : 
Then  doth  she  coyly  turn  her  face  aside 
That  half  her  cheek  is  scarce  sometimes  descried. 

The  quatrains  of  Immortality  would  require  rather  too  long  an  extract, 
but  one  of  the  Astrcea  "  Hymnes  "  must  be  given  : — 


CHAP,  in     SPENSER S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     107 

Large  as  is  the  amount  of  Chapman's  non-dramatic  Chapman. 
poetry,  a  prosodic  study  of  it  need  deal  with  but  two 
things — his  couplet  and  his  fourteeners ;  while  the  handling 
of  the  former  need  not  be  very  protracted.  For  the  lyre, 
and  even  for  those  stanza  measures  which  always  have 
something  of  the  lyrical  in  them,  he  seems  to  have  been 
less  disqualified  than  disinclined.  The  nine-lined  couplet- 
ended  staves  of  Ovid's  Banquet  of  Sense  are  by  no  means 
destitute  of  a  grave  beauty  ;  and  the  Song  of  Corinna 
therein  is  not  unmusical.  No  one  need  speak  prosodic 
evil  of  the  sixains  of  The  Amorous  Zodiac,  or  of  the 
mono-rhymed  octosyllabic  quatrains  of  that  Contention  of 
Phillis  and  Flora  for  which  Chapman  (most  original  of 
translators  and  most  given  to  translations  of  all  original 
writers,  with  the  exception  in  both  cases  of  Edward 
FitzGerald)  went  to  the  Middle  Ages  to  fetch.  His 
sonnets  have  a  rare  stateliness  ;  he  can  manage  divers 
lyrical  measures  in  his  version  of  Petrarch's  Penitential 
Psalms.  In  the  Guiana  poem,  though  he  slips  into 
couplets  now  and  then,  he  means  blank  verse — a  notable 
thing  at  that  time  off  the  stage.  But  these  are  all  mere 
hors-d'oeuvre  to  him. 

The  reason  why  it  is  not   necessary  to  say  much  of 

IX 
TO   FLORA 

E  impress  of  flowers,  tell  where  away 

L  ies  your  sweet  court,  this  merry  May, 

I  n  green  wide  garden  alleys  : 

S  ince  there  the  heav'nly  powers  do  play 

A  nd  haunt  no  other  valleys. 

B   eauty,  Virtue,  Majesty, 
E   loquent  muses,  three  times  three, 
T   he  new  fresh  Hours  and  Graces, 
H  ave  pleasure  in  this  place  to  be 
A  bove  all  other  places. 

R  oses  and  lilies  did  them  draw, 

E  re  they  divine  Astrsea  saw, 

G  ay  flowers  they  sought  for  pleasure  : 

I    nstead  of  gath'ring  crowns  of  flowers, 

N  ow  gather  they  Astnea's  dowers, 

A  nd  bear  to  Heaven  that  treasure. 


io8  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

His  minor  his  couplet  is  that  almost  everything  which  has  been 
already  said,  in  the  last  chapter,  of  his  blank  verse, 
applies  to  it.  It  is  grave  and  noble  ;  nor  does  it  ever 
allow  itself  the  eccentricities  of  Donne — the  "  holes  that 
you  may  put  your  hand  in  "  that  so  did  annoy  Sir  John 
Beaumont.  It  is,  in  this  resembling  the  similar  verse  of 
his  contemporaries  Drayton  and  Daniel,  neither  con- 
spicuously stopped  nor  conspicuously  overlapped,  though 
it  tries  both  ways  at  times.  Perhaps — the  couplet  short 
of  unbridled  overlapping  effecting  this  almost  per  se — it 
is  a  little  less  embroiled  and  obscure  than  the  blank 
verse  of  the  plays,  and  it  is  noteworthy  that  at  its 
obscurest,  as  in  the  famous  Shadow  of  Night,  it  succumbs 
to  the  temptation  of  enjambment  most.  But  the  pre- 
vailing characteristics  are  those  of  thought  and  action, 
not  of  metre.  Chapman,  in  Mr.  Swinburne's  excellent 
application,  "  cannot  clear  his  mouth  of  pebbles  "  ;  but  it 
is  the  flow  of  his  speech  and  thought  rather  than  of  his 
verse  that  the  pebbles  obstruct,  though  they  prevent  this 
also  from  being  very  fluent.  Still,  there  are  worse  things 
both  in  sound  and  to  sight  than  the  ripple  round  pebbles. 

His  fourteener.  But  the  metre  which  Chapman  was,  if  not  "  born  to 
introduce,"  born  to  perfect  and  consummate  as  a  vehicle 
of  extended  narrative  was  the  fourteener.  His  strong 
attraction  for  it  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  he  absolutely 
tried  both  it  and  the  couplet  for  part  of  the  Iliad,  and 
abandoned  the  latter.  That  he  did  not  make  a  similar 
double  attempt  or  experiment  in  the  case  of  the  Odyssey 
is,  I  think,  sufficiently  accounted  for  by  his  saturation 
with  the  almost  pedantic  scholarship  of  the  age.  The 
ancients  had  drawn  a  distinction  between  the  simple 
and  passionate  Iliad,  the  complex  and  manners-painting 
Odyssey.  The  old  fourteener,  with  its  age-long  history, 
its  ballad  associations,  corresponded  to  the  former  de- 
scription ;  the  modern  and  rather  sophisticated  decasyllabic 
couplet  to  the  latter.  It  is  true  that  the  Odyssey  itself 
contains  some  of  Chapman's  best  couplet  work,  but  both 
in  itself  and  as  an  equivalent  for  the  original  it  cannot 
vie  with  his  Iliad.  I  cannot  understand  how  any  one 


CHAP,  in      SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     109 

who  can  read  the  Greek  can  tolerate  Chapman's  Odyssey 
except  as  a  student :  one  can  read  his  Iliad  with  the 
original  sounding  in  one's  ears  and  say,  "  Well  done  our 
side  ! "  The  contribution  of  the  prosody  to  this  success 
is  our  business  here ;  and  it  is  the  importance  of  it  which 
makes  appropriate  what  was  formerly  promised — a  short 
study  of  the  fourteener  itself,  in  connection,  but  not 
merely  in  connection,  with  Chapman's  employment  of  it, 
and  in  especial  bearing  on  those  earlier  attempts  to  use 
it  for  purposes  of  translation  which  were  passed  over. 
For  that  Chapman  was  indebted  to  Phaer  and  Golding 
(to  name  no  others),  at  least  for  suggesting  the  metre  to 
him,  there  can  be  no  manner  of  doubt.  Of  late  years  its 
there  has  been  a  certain  tendency  to  put  up  the  estimate  Predecessors 
of  these  two,  especially  of  Golding,  who  was  also  set  much  Golding,'  etc. 
above  Phaer  by  Warton  ;  and  there  has  been  a  stately 
reproduction  of  the  Ovid.1  Here  are  some  extracts  from 
both  on  which  to  base  criticism.2 

1  Ed.  Moring  and  Gollancz  (London,  1904). 

2  It  may  not  be  an  uninteresting  connection  with  ' '  the  ancestors  "  to  take 
the  selections  from  those  passages  which  Webbe  (a  great  admirer  of  Phaer)  and 
Warton  respectively  admired  in  the  two. 

Phaer: — 

Three  times  her  hand  she  bet,  and  three  times  strake  her  comely  breast ; 
Her  golden  hair  she  tare  and  frantic-like  with  mood  opprest ; 
She  cried  "  O  Jupiter,  O  God,"  quoth  she,  "  and  shall  'a  go  ? 
Indeed  !  and  shall  'a  flout  me  thus  within  my  kingdom  so  ? 
Shall  not  mine  armies  out,  and  all  my  people  them  pursue  ? 
Shall  they  not  spoil  their  ships  and  burn  them  up  with  vengeance  due  ? 
Out  people,  out  upon  them,  follow  fast  with  fires  and  flames — 
Set  sail  aloft,  make  out  with  oars,  in  ships,  in  boats,  in  frames  [rafts  ?]. 
— What  speak  I  ?  or  where  am  I  ?  what  furies  do  me  enchant  ? 
O  Dido,  woful  wretch,  now  dest'nies  fell  thy  head  doth  haunt." 

Golding : — 

The  princely  palace  of  the  Sun  stood  gorgeous  to  behold, 
On  stately  pillars  builded  high  of  yellow  burnished  gold, 
Beset  with  sparkling  carbuncles,  that  like  to  fire  did  shine, 
The  roof  was  framed  curiously  of  ivory  pure  and  fine. 
The  two  door-leaves,  of  silver  clear,  a  radiant  light  did  cast, 
But  yet  the  cunning  workmanship  of  things  therein  far  past 
The  stuff  whereof  the  doors  were  made.      For  there  a  perfect  plat 
Had  Vulcan  drawn  of  all  the  world  ;  both  of  the  surges  that 
Embrace  the  earth  with  winding  waves,  and  of  the  steadfast  ground, 
And  of  the  heaven  itself  also,  that  both  encloseth  round. 

"  It  is  not  so  bad,"  as  Mr.  Foker  observed  of  his  and  Pendennis's  libations  ; 
and  Phaer  at  least  attains  sometimes  to  trisyllabics,  virtual  if  not  intended. 


I  lo  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

Southwell  and  But  as  a  rule,  though  less  than  usual  in  these  passages, 
the  defect  of  all  these  writers  —  Golding  perhaps 
escapes  it  oftener  than  the  others — is  what  has  been 
elsewhere  termed  the  "  lolloping  "  character  of  their  verse. 
They  seem  unable  to  "  lift "  it,  in  the  jockey's  sense,  over 
the  ground.  To  shift  the  metaphor  from  riding  to  walk- 
ing, they  all  appear  to  be  "  down-gyved  "  like  Hamlet  in 
his  ill-fated  visit  to  Ophelia,  and  they  shuffle  along  in 
the  hamper  of  their  nether  garments  in  a  truly  deplorable 
manner.  Every  now  and  then,  in  a  short  poem,  some 
fire  of  passion,  earthly  or  heavenly,  gets  them  out  of  the 
difficulty,  as  in  Southwell's  magnificent  Burning  Babe  ; 
but  one  feels  that  it  is  not  far  off.  The  great  place, 
however,  before  Chapman  for  observing  the  phenomena 
of  the  fourteener  is,  of  course,  Warner's  Albion's  England. 
And  in  this  examination  it  is  well  not  to  neglect  the 
mechanical  but  useful  aid  of  typographical  arrangement. 
The  original  volume  is  printed  in  actual  fourteeners,  and 
the  present  writer,  nearly  thirty  years  ago,  took  care  to 
reproduce  this  in  the  extract  given  in  Mr.  Ward's  Poets. 
But  Chalmers,  in  the  not  very  "  gnostical  "  admiration  (as 
his  own  time  would  have  said)  of  that  time  for  ballad, 
thought  fit  to  balladise  the  whole,1  to  the  great  waste  of 
space,  and  to  the  great  damage,  except  in  a  few  fragments, 
of  the  verse.  The  splitting  up,  however,  does  make 
evident — what  indeed  could  have  been  easily  found  out 
by  any  careful  observer  without  it — certain  weaknesses 
of  the  metre,  unless  it  is  managed  with  a  great  deal  of 
art.  If  you  make  a  strong  break  of  rhythm  at  the 
eighth  syllable,  as  in  the  unapproached  common-measure 
poems  of  the  earlier  seventeenth  century,  you  dislocate 
your  line  too  much,  and  prevent  the  continuity  which 
narrative  requires.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  you  make  no 
break  at  all,  the  line  becomes  flaccid  and  expressionless, 
and  hobbles  or  ambles  along,  from  unmarked  beginning 

1  Warton  before  him  had  identified  Phaer's  and  Gelding's  metre  with 
that  of  Sternhold  and  Hopkins ;  for  which,  of  course,  fight  might  be  made. 
But,  as  a  fact,  the  continuous  fourteener  and  the  common  measure  distich 
have  differences  which  are  not  merely  typographical.  Each  develops  a 
different  side  of  the  common  possibilities — and  should  develop  it. 


CHAP,  in     SPENS£J?S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     in 

to    unremarkable    end,    with    the    slipshod    effect    noted 
above. 

To  come  to  Chapman  himself :  in  the  first  line  of  the  chapman's 

Fourteenth  Book comments  on 

his  own  verses. 

Not  wine  nor  feasts  could  lay  their  soft  chains  on  old  Nestor's  ear, 

we  find  the  annotation,  "  This  first  verse,  after  the  first 
four  syllables,  is  to  be  read  as  one  of  our  tens."  Now 
what  exactly  did  he  mean  by  this  ?  and  why,  whatever 
he  meant,  did  he  take  the  trouble  to  say  it  in  this  unusual 
manner?  There  cannot  be  much  doubt  about  the 
answer  to  either  question.  He  wished  to  indicate  that 
the  caesura  is  in  an  unusual  place  ;  and  so,  for  him,  it  is. 
Chapman  is  ordinarily  most  punctilious  about  having  a 
caesura — not,  of  course,  necessarily  a  stop  in  punctua- 
tion, but  certainly  a  completion  of  possible  sense  and 
rhythm — at  his  eighth  syllable.  Here  you  can  only  get 
such  a  stop  by  separating  adjective  and  substantive,  which 
evidently  troubled  his  careful  soul  ;  and  accordingly  he 
points  out  that  the  division  of  the  line  must  be  extra- 
ordinary ;  that  you  are  not  to  look  for  the  ordinary 
rhythm  of  the  fourteener,  but  to  take  the  first  four 
syllables  by  themselves  and  accommodate  the  rest  with 
the  ordinary  decasyllabic  scansion.  Now  this  very  clearly 
shows  that  the  fact  that  fourteen  syllables  do  not  make 
an  eight-and-six,  or  a  fourteener  at  pleasure,  but  that 
you  ought  to  make  up  your  mind  with  which  charmer 
you  will  be  happy,  had  not  dawned  on  his  mind.  And 
it  also  shows  that  the  Gascoignian  superstitions  (in- 
deed, Chapman  was  nearer  Gascoigne  in  age  than  any 
of  his  great  contemporaries  in  the  Jacobean  time)  were 
still  rife — that  the  liberty  of  prosodising  had  yet  to  be 
preached.  His  position,  in  fact,  is  untenable  on  his  own 
showing.  You  cannot,  on  any  theory  of  prosody  that  is 
not  a  mere  go-as-you-please  anarchy,  intrude  a  four-and- 
ten  into  a  company  of  eights-and-sixes.  But  both  will 
go  together  in  a  team  of  frank  fourteeners  as  merrily 
and  rhythmically  as  may  be. 


112  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

But  he  had   not  these  crotchets  always  in  his  head. 
The  voyage  to  Chrysa  and  the  beautiful  single  line — 

But  when  the  lady  of  the  light,  the  rosy-fingered  morn, 

which,  wisely  perceiving  his  windfall,  he  repeats ;  the 
description  of  Helen  in  the  Third  Book  with  that  other 
jewel,  a  couplet  this  time — 

To  set  her  thoughts  at  gaze  and  see,  in  her  clear  beauty's  flood, 
What  choice  of  glory  swum  to  her  yet  tender  womanhood 

(where,  as  in  a  thousand  other  places,  it  does  not  in  the 
least  matter  whether  Chapman  writes  Homer,  the  point  is 
that  he  writes  poetry)  ;  the  fine  line-conclusion — 

her  bright  and  ominous  blaze, 

in  the  passage  of  the  descent  of  Pallas  ;  the  interesting 
double  version  earlier  and  later,  part  of  which  shall  be 
given  below,1  of  Achilles'  speech  in  the  Ninth  Book ; 
passage  after  passage  of  the  Battle  at  the  Ships,  which 
seems  to  have  specially  caught  Chapman's  English 
imagination ;  the  Beguilement  of  Zeus,  an  admirable 
rendering  of  that  admirable  passage  which  so  much 
disturbed  the  prudery  of  ancient  criticasters ;  the  special 
patches  of  the  Prayer  of  Ajax  and  the  Shield  of  Achilles, 
— Chapman  is  equal  to  them  all,  in  gross  and  in  detail, 
in  general  effect  and  in  the  jewelry  of  single  verses. 

Of  course,  there  are  plenty  of  weak  lines  to  balance 

1  1598=— 

Nor  all  the  wealth  Troy  held  before  the  arms  she  now  enfolds, 

Nor  what  Apollo's  stony  fane  in  rocky  Pythos  holds, 

I  value  equal  to  my  life,  spent  with  a  pleasant  mind  : 

Oxen,  sheep,  trivets,  crest-deck'd  horse,  fortune  or  strength  may  find, 

But  of  an  human  soul  no  prize  nor  conquest  can  be  made 

When  the  white  formers  of  his  speech  are  forced  to  let  it  fade. 

1611  : — 

Not  all  the  wealth  of  well-built  Troy  possess'd  when  peace  was  there, 

All  that  Apollo's  marble  fane  in  stony  Pythos  holds, 

I  value  equal  with  the  life  that  my  free  breast  enfolds. 

Sheep,  oxen,  tripods,  crest-deck'd  horse,  though  lost,  may  come  again, 

But  when  the  white  guard  of  our  teeth  no  longer  can  contain 

Our  human  soul,  away  it  flies,  and  once  gone,  never  more 

To  her  frail  mansion  any  man  can  his  lost  powers  restore. 


CHAP,  in     SPENSE&S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     113 

these,  and  the  number  of  them  in  such  a  poet  as  Chapman 
is  a  sufficient  proof  of  the  insufficiency  of  the  metre  for 
continual  use  when  unequivalenced.  The  verse,  indeed, 
personifying  it  as  its  own  time  would  have  loved  to  do, 
might  rise  in  righteous  wrath  and  say,  "  I  am  not  to  be 
blamed  for  such  things  as — 

Achilles  called  a  court 
Of  all  the  Greeks  ;  Heaven's  white-armed  Queen,  who,  everywhere 

cut  short, 

Beholding  her  loved  Greeks  by  death,  suggested  it ;  and  he 
(All  met  in  one)  arose  and  said,  '  Atrides  !  now  I  see ' " — 

where  the  unconscionable  inversion  and  syntactical 
muddlement  might  take  place  in  any  metre,  equivalenced 
or  rigid,  if  the  poet  were  careless  enough.  But  when 
you  come,  on  the  opposite  page  in  the  current  modern 
edition,  to  such  another  line  as — 

Bright-cheeked  Chryseis.      For  conduct  of  all  which  we  must  choose, 

the  conditions  are  different  The  grammar  is  quite  im- 
peccable, and  the  composition  likewise,  but  unfortunately 
the  thing,  even  granting  "  conduct,"  is  hardly  a  verse  at 
all.  And  there  are  too  many  like  it.  The  fact,  of  course, 
is  that  pure  iambic  fourteeners,  like  blank  verse  and 
heroic  couplets,  can,  with  a  little  practice,  be  written,  after 
a  fashion,  almost,  if  not  quite,  as  rapidly  as  prose.  One 
could  not  say  that  Chapman  never  reminds  us  of  this 
fact. 

Now  he  himself  saw  this  ;  whether  he  saw  that  he  saw 
it,  is  (must  it  be  repeated  ?)  not  of  the  smallest  consequence. 
He  did  not  see  beyond  his  own  age,  and  therefore  did 
not  (as  he  might  have  done  if  only  per  impossibile  he  had 
looked  before  and  after  to  Gamelyn  and  to  Sigurd}  adopt 
the  one  device  which  makes  the  fourteener  a  perfect 
vehicle — free,  yet  not  too  free,  substitution  of  anapaests. 
But  he  saw  a  good  deal ;  and  the  result  is  that  though 
his  fourteener  cannot  be  accepted  as  a  perfect  medium  for 
so  long  a  poem,  it  has  lifts  and  bursts  which  make  it  a 
"  grand  compounder  " — something  which  attains  the  high 
degrees  without  exactly  complying  with  minute  or 

VOL.  II  I 


I14  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

constant  counsels  of  perfection.      Nay,  in  his  very  third 
line — 

From  breasts  heroic  ;  sent  them  far  to  that  invisible  cave, 

he  shows  (as  also  in  "  ominous "  quoted  above)  that 
he  felt,  if  he  did  not  consciously  know  it,  the  secret  of 
the  anapaest  itself.  From  the  first,  too,  and  throughout, 
he  knows  as  well  (there  can  be  no  doubt  here)  the  other 
secret  of  the  variation  of  the  pause.  It  would  be  a 
piquant  experiment,  but  one  of  those  on  which  millionaires 
might  spend  their  money  with  better  reason  than  any 
which  can  be  alleged  for  their  usual  spend  ings,  to  print, 
not  the  whole  (which  would  be  as  unfair  as  printing  all 
Chatterton  with  modern  spelling),  but  considerable  parts 
of  the  Iliad  on  the  principle  of  dividing  the  lines  ballad- 
fashion  where  the  caesura,  in  sense  or  punctuation,  corre- 
sponds ;  straight  on  as  fourteeners  where  the  line  is 
practically  unbroken  ;  and  in  stepped  fashion  where  the 
pause  comes  hither  or  thither  of  the  middle  division  of 
eight  and  six.  But,  short  of  this  open  object-lesson  of 
things  oculis  subjecta  fidelibus,  it  cannot  be  so  very  difficult, 
for  any  one  who  is  curious,  to  read  the  lines  of  a  fair  body 
of  verse  on  this  principle,  and  so  discover  the  effect.  The 
process  should  not  be  disagreeable  to  any  one  who  has 
broken  himself  to  reading  in  accordance  with  scansion  ; 
and  nobody  who  will  not  do  this  will  ever  really  appreciate 
prosody. 

jonson.  The  curious  contrast  between  the  hardness  of  Ben 
Jonson's  blank  verse  and  the  softened  quality,  sometimes 
reaching  ipsa  mollifies,  of  his  lyric,  has  been  noted  above  ; 
with  the  fact  that  the  melting  process  is  shown  cumula- 
tively in  his  handling  of  that  couplet  which  in  language  a 
little  ambiguous  (see  chapter  on  Prosodists]  he  extolled  so 
to  Drummond.  That  is  to  say,  if  you  took  all  the  couplet 
passages  from  the  plays,  and  put  them  together  with  all 
those  in  the  poems,  there  is  a  good  deal  of  it.  But  the 
couplet,  from  its  very  nature,  requires  a  very  considerable 
field  of  exercise  in  order  to  allow  it  to  display  any  special 
qualities  ;  and  for  this  or  that  cause  Ben  did  not  give  it 


CHAP,  in      SPENSERS  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     115 

such  a  field.  The  epigrams  are  naturally  couched  in  it 
for  the  most  part ;  but  it  is  rather  curious  that  this  kind, 
even  with  the  wide  ancient  extension  which  he  prided 
himself  on  giving  to  it,  by  no  means  invariably,  or  very 
often,  tempted  him  to  adopt  the  incisive  form  which  it 
seems  so  naturally  to  invite.  That  to  Donne  comes  as 
near  as  most ;  but,  as  will  be  seen  below,1  it  is  not 
exemplary.  It  cannot  be  said  that  the  sixth  line,  whether 
scanned  with  elision  or  with  trisyllabic  substitution,  is 
euphonious ;  in  fact,  it  is  nearly  as  ugly  as  some  of 
Donne's  own  in  the  same  kind,  and  suggests  the  same 
contrast  of  wonder  with  the  impeccable  lyrics.  If  this 
was  the  "  hexameter-like  breaking "  which  Ben  admired, 
one  can  only  be  glad  that  he  did  not  practise  it  oftener. 
But  there  cannot  be  much  doubt  that  the  craze  for  rough- 
ness in  satire  extended  to  epigram  likewise,  though 
neither  Catullus  nor  Martial  can  be  said  here  to  suggest 
what  may  seem  to  be  suggested  by  Horace  and  Persius. 
In  The  Forest  his  prepossession  vanishes ;  but  the 
beautiful  couplets  of  the  "Penshurst"  poem  are  very  much 
enjambed,  as  are  most  of  the  rest,  especially  the  famous 
Shakespeare-piece.  Indeed,  they  actually  give  ground  for 
thinking  that  "  broken  "  meant  "  enjambed."  But  of  this 
elsewhere. 

The  interest  of  the  Fletcher  brothers  2  for  us  consists  The  Fletchers. 
mainly,  and  that  of  Giles  (perhaps  the  better  poet  of  the 
two)  wholly,  in  their  interesting  if  not  exactly  felicitous 

1  Donne,  the  delight  of  Phoebus  and  each  muse, 
Who,  to  thy  one,  all  other  brains  refuse ; 
Whose  every  work,  of  thy  most  early  wit, 
Came  forth  example,  and  remains  so  yet ; 
Longer  a-knowing  than  most  wits  do  live, 
And  -which  no  affection  praise  enough  can  give  ! 
To  it,  thy  language,  letters,  arts,  best  life, 
Which  might  with  half  mankind  maintain  a  strife, 
All  which  I  meant  to  praise — and  yet  I  would — 
But  leave  because  I  cannot  as  I  should. 

2  If  the  recent  attempts  to  credit  Phineas  with  Britain's  Ida  were  well 
founded,  it  would  be  a  considerable  additional  asset  for  him.  But  I  do  not 
see  any  real  evidence  for  the  assignment,  and  it  seems  to  have  escaped  the 
assignors  that  it  is  an  odd  sort  of  argument  to  say  that  it  must  be  Phineas's 
because  it  is  in  Giles's  stanza. 


Ii6  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

variations  on  the  Spenserian  stanza.  These  variations 
may  have  been  dictated  either  by  mere  reverence  for  the 
master,  whose  influence  was  so  obvious  in  both,  or  through 
a  desire  "  to  create  for  oneself,"  or  perhaps  by  a  mixture 
of  the  two  feelings  and  a  hope  to  escape  disastrous 
comparison  by  slightly  innovating.  It  cannot  be  said, 
despite  the  extraordinary  beauty,  in  a  sort  of  prae- 
Raphaelite  kind,  of  parts  of  Chrisfs  Victory  and  fewer 
parts  of  the  longer  Purple  Island,  that  either  form  is  a 

Giles,  success.  Giles  dropped  line  seven  of  the  Spenserian,  but 
retained  the  order  of  the  rhymes  and  the  final  Alexan- 
drine.1 This  gives  a  triplet  at  the  close,  which  is  some- 
times not  ineffective  in  itself,  but  seriously  damages  both 
the  individual  and  the  social  merits  of  the  stanza.  From 
the  first  point  of  view  the  extraordinary  unity — the 
"  seamless  coat " — of  the  Spenserian,  is  broken  into 
quintet  and  triplet,  inevitably  in  sound,  and  by  strong 
temptation  in  sense  and  suggestion,  like  the  octave  and 
sestet  arrangement  of  a  sonnet.  From  the  second,  the 
accumulation  of  rhymes  in  the  triplet  and  the  culmination 
by  the  Alexandrine  in  the  same  way  suggests  a  much 
stronger  stop  than  the  couplet-ending,  and  so  arrests  and 
injures  that  curious  concatenation  which,  side  by  side 
with  its  individual  integrity,  is  the  glory  of  the  great 
novena. 

Phineas.  Not  satisfied  with  this,  or  fearing  to  touch  it  (for  he 
had,  and  constantly  expresses,  almost  as  great  a  reverence 
for  the  brother  who  died  so  long  before  him  as  both  had 
for  Spenser),  Phineas  used  the  shears  still  further,  and 

1  This  form  is  also  adopted  in  the  curious  poem  on  St.  Mary  Magdalene 
(E.E.T.S.,  London,  1899),  but  almost  certainly  as  a  following  of  Fletcher. 
Some  would  regard  it  as,  in  origin,  rather  a  building  up  of  rhyme-royal  with 
an  Alexandrine  than  as  a  cutting  down  of  the  Spenserian,  but  I  think  this 
very  much  less  likely.  Here  is  a  stanza  of  Giles's  own  : — 

The  garden  like  a  lady  fair  was  cut, 

That  lay  as  if  she  slumbered  in  delight, 

And  to  the  open  skies  her  eyes  did  shut ; 

The  azure  fields  of  Heaven  were  'sembled  right 

In  a  large  round,  set  with  the  flowers  of  light — 

The  flowers-de-luce,  and  the  round  sparks  of  dew, 

That  hung  upon  their  azure  leaves,  did  shew 

Like  twinkling  stars  that  sparkle  in  the  evening  blue. 


CHAP,  in      SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS      117 

cut  off  the  last  line  of  the  quintet,  leaving  quatrain  and 
triplet  to  make  up  a  new  seven-line  stanza.1  Whether 
this  is  better  or  worse  in  itself  than  the  octave  of  Giles, 
I  am  not  quite  sure.  I  used  to  think  it  more  of  an 
improvement  than  I  do  now.  But  I  have  never  varied 
in  considering  both  as  possessing  the  same  faults,  when 
compared  with  their  original.  It  says  something  for  the 
power  which  both  these  poets  have  of  merging  defects  of 
form,  and  even  of  subject,  in  floods  of  poetic  fancy  and 
phrase,  that  they  get  over  the  defects  of  their  form  itself. 
But  things  so  beautiful  as  those  cited  would  look  well  in 
any  garment. 

The  remaining  metres  of  Phineas  need  slighter  notice. 
He  tried  in  his  Piscatory  Eclogues  yet  another  septet, 
rhyme-royal  with  the  last  line  extended  to  an  Alexandrine, 
his  brother's  stanza,  an  ordinary  rhyme -royal,  sixains, 
Spenserians  with  triplet  ending,  quintets  with  Alexan- 
drine close,  heptasyllabic  couplets  ;  and  in  his  Miscellanies 
various  short  lyrical  mixtures.  He  is  never  prosodically 
incompetent ;  but  he  seems  to  suffer  from  a  kind  of 
prosodic  fidgetiness. 

William  Browne,  not  one  of  the  strongest  of  poets,  Browne. 
but  also  not  one  of  the  least  engaging,  has  more  appeals 
than  one ;  and  it  so  happens  that  most,  if  not  all,  of 
these  concern  prosody.  That  he,  when  all  Middle 
English  poetry  save  Chaucer  was  passing  into  utter 
neglect,  save  by  a  few  students,  for  all  but  two  centuries, 
read  and  revived  Occleve  is  something  ;  that,  after  these 
two  centuries,  he  himself  was  read,  and,  what  is  more, 
followed  by  Keats,  is  something  more.  It  would  have 
been  lucky  if  the  following  had  been  only  prosodic  ;  for 
few  people  can  be  sorry  for  Keats's  return  to  enjamb- 
ment,  extravagant  as  it  may  be.  But  there  might,  with 

1  The  early  morn  lets  out  the  peeping  day, 
And  strewed  his  path  with  golden  marigolds  : 
The  moon  grows  wan,  and  stars  fly  all  away  ; 
Whom  Lucifer  locks  up  in  wonted  folds 
Till  light  is  quenched,  and  Heaven  in  seas  hath  flung 
The  headlong  day  :  to  the  hill  the  shepherds  throng, 
And  Thirsil  now  began  to  end  his  task  and  song. 


u8  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

considerable  advantage,  have  been  less  in  Endymion  of 
the  overrunning  of  fable  as  well  as  of  verse,  which  is 
characteristic  of  Britannia's  Pastorals. 

Misdealings  As  for  the  first  of  these  connections  in  our  matter, 
Occieve  Browne  was  the  first  to  print,  as  part  of  his  own  Shepherd's 
Pipe,  but  with  full  attribution,  Occleve's  tale  of  Jonathas. 
Perhaps  the  story,  though  it  is  one  of  Occleve's  best 
pieces  of  work,  did  not  please  ;  for  Browne  never  carried 
out  his  intention  of  giving  the  rest,  which  he  says  were 
"  all  perfect  in  his  hands."  One  cannot  but  be  sorry 
that  he  did  not  say  something  about  the  versification, 
which  looks  all  the  odder  beside  his  own  sweet  and 
fluent  style.  Probably  he  thought,  as  almost  everybody 
did  for  some  three  centuries,  that  you  were  not  to  expect 
any  system  in  these  old  poets.  But  he  showed  that  he 
had  more  grace  than  many  editors  of  greater  name,  and 
more  vaunted  scholarship,  by  attempting  no  mendings. 
The  result,  of  course,  is  that  poor  Occieve,  who  never  had 
much  smoothness  to  lose,  is  occasionally  robbed  even  of 
what  he  has,  as  where 

Reigned  in  Rome,  and  hadd?  sonnes  three, 
becomes 

Reigned  in  Rome,  and  had  sons  three  ; 
or  where 

Unmeeble  good  right  noon,  withouten  ooth, 

is  turned,  correctly  in  sense,  but  to  the  impairing  of  the 
metre,  into  " unmoveable"  At  the  other  end,  though  he 
reads  in  one  place,  "  Thus  it  is  said,"  instead  of  "  Thus 
saith  the  book,"  he  keeps  to  his  text  so  closely  as  to 
retain  the  odd  phrase  "gyle  man,"1  where  even  modern 
preciseness  expects  that  "  wo "  should  be  supplied.  He 
himself  is  among  the  easiest  and  smoothest  of  writers, 
whether  in  octosyllable  or  decasyllabic.  In  the  honeyed 

1  Thus  wrecchedly  this  gyle  [wojman  dyed. 


CHAP,  in      SP£NS£K'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     119 

eights  and  sevens1  of  the  first  as  he  writes  it  there  is  His  "sevens." 
indeed  nothing  very  new  or  special ;  they  were  among 
the  most  frequent  numbers  of  all  poets  from  Shakespeare 
to  Milton.  And  the  perfection  with  which  not  only  these 
mighty  singers,  but  quite  small  poets,  like  Barnfield,  and 
not  very  great  ones,  like  Browne  himself  and  Wither,  or 
giants  of  hardly  lesser  than  godlike  race,  like  Jonson 
and  Fletcher,  used  them,  is  very  remarkable.  On  the 
other  hand,  in  the  enjambed  decasyllabic  couplet,  the 
staple  metre  of  Britannia's  Pastorals,  it  is  not  clear  that 
Browne  had  any  direct  master  (save  perhaps  Marlowe), 
while  he  and  Wither  were  the  earliest  copious  practitioners 
in  it.  It  is  indeed  necessary  to  repeat  the  caution  that 
the  thing  is  no  actual  novelty.  It  appears,  and  was 
bound  to  appear,  as  soon  as  we  have  any  considerable 
practice  with  the  couplet,  in  Chaucer,  and  it  was  being 
developed  by  Drayton  in  the  generation  before  Browne. 
But  before  the  second  decade  of  the  seventeenth  century 
it  was  a  variant,  a  sort  of  escape.  It  was  only  then  that 
it  became,  if  not  dominant,  a  serious  candidate  for  domi- 
nance, and  so,  in  fact,  forced  its  rival,  the  stopped  form, 
into  as  definite  pretensions,  which  at  last  triumphed. 

It  has  beyond  all  question  singular  charms,  especially  His  enjambed 
that  one  for  which  the  Latins  called  a  woman  morigera,  couPlet- 
and  the  French  still  call  her  avenante,  while  we  used  to 
call   her  "  coming."       There   is   nothing   stiff  or  "  stand- 
off" or  abrupt  about  it ;    it  meets   the  poet    more  than 
half-way,  and  lends  itself  to  any  sport  of  fancy  or  conceit 
in    him    with    untiring    complaisance.       Its    compass    of 

1  Here  are  some  nearly  pure  sevens  : — 

See  how  every  stream  is  dressed 

By  her  margin  with  the  best 

Of  Flora's  gifts :  she  seems  glad 

For  such  brooks  such  flowers  she  had. 

And  the  trees  are  quaintly  tired 

With  green  buds,  of  all  desired  ; 

And  the  hawthorn,  every  day, 

Spreads  some  little  show  of  May. 

See  the  primrose  sweetly  sit 

By  the  much-loved  violet,  etc. 

where  only  1.  3  has  not  made  up  its  mind,  as  it  easily  might,  to  be  eight  or 
seven. 


120  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

melody  is,  of  course,  far  greater  than  that  of  its  rival : 
only  a  very  bad  poet  indeed  can  be  monotonous  in  it. 
Adroitly  managed,  it  combines  the  advantages  and  powers 
of  the  stanza  with  those  of  the  couplet,  and  even  both 
with  those  of  the  blank  verse  paragraph  to  no  small 
extent.  For  description  it  has  no  peer,  inasmuch  as  it 
escapes  the  Qv&r-vignetted  effect  of  the  stanza,  and  the 
sharp  creases,  as  of  a  picture  folded  and  not  rolled,  that 
are  inseparable  from  the  stopped  distich.  And  for  the 
poetry  of  1600-1650,  with  its  prodigality  of  richly 
figured  and  coloured  conceit — the  description,  as  it  were, 
of  the  intellect, — it  is  equally  efficacious.1 

But  in  the  very  enumeration  of  these  advantages  and 
charms  the  suggestion  of  the  other  side  must  be  clear  to 
all  but  dullest  wits.  Enchantresses  are  extremely  nice 
persons  at  times  ;  but  they  are  always  dangerous.  And 
this  enchantress  is  notoriously  the  very  Circe  of  her  kind. 
Ulysses  can  master  her,  and  perhaps  Ulysses  is  rather 
unwise  if  he  ever  goes  away  from  her  to  her  precise  and 
orderly  rival  with  the  everlasting  machine -work.  But 
then  everybody  is  not  Ulysses.  Most  of  her  lovers  get 
pretty  soon  flustered  with  the  cup  of  her  enchantments, 
and  some  of  them  even  undergo  the  further  transformation. 

Browne  is  not  Ulysses  ;  but  neither  is  he  Gryll.  The 
most  remarkable  effect  of  the  Circean  spells  upon  him  is 
that  glanced  at  above,  and  noticeable  in  almost  all 
practitioners  of  this  form,  except  (I  should  say,  though 
some  would  not)  the  late  Mr.  William  Morris.  There  is 

1  Here  is  a  passage  taken,  as  I  always  prefer  to  do,  almost  at  random  : — 

It  chanced  one  morn,  clad  in  a  robe  of  grey, 

And  blushing  oft,  as  rising  to  betray, 

Enticed  this  lovely  maiden  from  her  bed 

(So  when  the  roses  have  discovered 

Their  taintless  beauties,  flies  the  early  bee 

About  the  winding  alleys  merrily) 

Into  the  wood,  and  'twas  her  usual  sport, 

Sitting  where  most  harmonious  birds  resort, 

To  imitate  their  warbling  in  Aprill, 

Wrought  by  the  hand  of  Pan,  which  she  did  fill 

Half  full  of  water  : 

The  actual  verse-sentence  does  not  end  for  another  half-dozen  lines. 


CHAP,  in      SPEIVSEX'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     121 

no  very  cogent  reason  why  the  liberty  of  enjambment  in 
verse  should  lead  to  confusion  in  narrative  and  exposition. 
After  all,  whether  you  give  to  a  particular  subdivision 
of  your  subject  twenty  lines  in  a  bundle  of  ten  pairs,  or 
in  batches  of  seven  and  thirteen,  it  need  not  much 
matter  to  the  conduct  of  the  subject  itself.  But  in 
practice  it  does.  Endymion  is  bad  enough  in  this  respect : 
the  best  way  is  to  keep  fast  hold  of  Cynthia's  hand  or 
waist,  and  never  mind  where  she  is  taking  you.  But  its 
originals  leave  it  far  behind.  I  have  found  it  my  duty 
to  make  a  regular  argument  of  Chamberlayne's/Yz<m>;z#zW<z; 
and  this  duty  has  not  been  imposed  upon  me  in  regard 
to  Britannia's  Pastorals,  so  that  I  am  not  quite  in  the  same 
position  with  regard  to  the  two.  But  from  reading  the 
Pastorals  more  than  once  or  twice,  I  should  say  that  they, 
although  the  shorter,  would  be  in  some  ways  the  harder 
to  reduce  to  precis.  And  much  the  same  is  the  case  with 
the  minor  poems  of  the  same  class  and  measure,  especi- 
ally Thealma  and  Clearchus.  The  contagion  of  breathless- 
ness  and  "  promiscuousness "  seems  to  spread  from  the 
structure  of  the  verse  to  that  of  the  story.  Yet,  when  one 
reads  such  a  passage  as  Wither's  "  Alresford  Pool,"  which 
will  be  given  presently,  or  any  one  of  scores  in  Browne, 
such  as  that  which  was  given  above,  it  is  very  hard  to 
quarrel  with  the  measure  or  the  method.  One  floats  on 
away,  afar,  with  such  pleasant  aimlessness,  and  in  such  an 
agreeable  country  !  It  is  a  little  relaxing  perhaps.  The 
charms  of  the  South  and  of  the  West  are  in  it.  But  there 
are  times  when  one  does  not  exactly  consider  the  north- 
easter the  only  "  wind  of  God  " — who  indeed,  according 
to  the  more  orthodox  view,  created  them  all. 

Browne,  however,  by  no   means    confined   himself  to 
this  one  metrical  mistress.      The  Pastorals  themselves  are 
interspersed  with  lyrical  admixtures  of  very  varied  kinds — 
octosyllables  and  heptasyllables  (though  fewer  of  these) 
and  stanzas  of  all  sorts,1  and  the  minor  poems  swell  the 

1  The  reader  will  find  in  Mr.  Gordon  Goodwin's  edition  of  Browne 
(London,  two  vols.,  1894)  abundant  examples,  from  the  wasp-waisted  kind, 
ii.  43  (which  is  mainly  decasyllabic,  but  contracts  itself  in  the  middle),  to  very 


122  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

tale  of  variety.  But  perhaps  the  best  place  of  all  for 
Browne's  power  in  irregular  metres  is  the  Inner  Temple 
Masque,  with  its  often -quoted  and  extremely  beautiful 
lyrical  overture — 

Steer  hither,  steer  your  winged  pines, 

the  completion  of  which  does  not  come  for  some  time  in 
the  original ;  and  with  a  large  choice  of  other  lyrical  metres, 
including  one  of  those  fantasticalities  rather  favoured  by 
the  Elizabethans  older  and  younger — an  "  Echo  Song." 
In  fact,  this  later  but  really  "  pleasant  Willy "  is  a  very 
good  example  of  the  way  in  which  his  master  had  in  his 
own  words  "  taught  all  the  woods  to  answer,  and  their 
echoes  ring  "  to  tunes  and  times  never  imagined  before. 
Wither.  His  almost  inseparable  companion  in  literary  history, 
Wither,  who  was  actually  his  friend,  has  very  much  less 
variety  of  accomplishment  and  much  volume  of  actually 
accomplished  verse  ;  but  for  this  very  reason  his  native 
woodnote  strikes,  and,  when  it  was  attended  to,  always 
has  struck,  hearers  and  readers  almost  more  forcibly. 
Wither  illustrated  both  his  pluck  and  his  silliness  by 
collecting  *  all  his  good  poems  under  the  name  of 
Juvenilia  when  he  was  nearly  thirty-five,  and  publish- 
ing hardly  anything  that  was  not  rubbish  later.  In 
fact,  out  of  The  Hymns  and  Songs  of  the  Church  and 
Hallelujah,  it  is  quite  in  vain  to  search  the  vast  desert  of 
his  later  work  for  anything  good  ;  and  the  samples  of 
good  hymn -metre  and  phrase  in  these  two2  are  not 
abundant  Even  the  Juvenilia  themselves  contain  plenty 
of  warning  both  of  what  was  to  come  and  of  what  was 
not.  The  whole  mass  of  the  satires  is  worthless  prosodic- 

beautiful  things  like  "Glide  soft,  ye  silver  floods,"  ii.  96.  Note  i.  225,  for 
closed  couplet,  and  "  Shall  I  tell  you  whom  I  love  ?  "  i.  235,  where  the  honey 
of  the  period  is  admirably  combed.  Note  also  i.  285,  "As  new-born  babes," 
which  is  especially  redolent  of  Spenser.  In  fact,  all  these  pieces  vividly 
recall  The  Shepherd's  Kalendar  with  another  generation  of  practice  added. 
The  Shepherd's  Pipe  invites  this  remembrance  still  more  candidly. 

1  The  Spenser  Society's  reprints  in  the  originals  must  be  consulted  by 
those  who  want  all  the  chaff  as  well  as  all  the  corn.     The  latter  is  to  be 
found  almost  completely  in  Mr.  Arber's  English  Garner. 

2  To  be  found  in  the  Library  of  Old  Authors,  ed.  Farr  (two  vols.,  London, 
1856-57). 


CHAP,  in      SPZNSEtfS  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS      123 

ally,  Wither's  rather  languid,  if  not  exactly  limp  couplet, 

being  quite  unfitted  for  use  as  whip-lash,  and  not  knowing, 

as  Browne's  did,  how  to  exchange  itself  for  something  else. 

Nor  is  it  much  good  in  his  other  pieces  for  any  purpose 

save  description,  where,  however,  it  achieves  mild  triumphs. 

The  already-mentioned  picture  of  Alresford  Pool l  I  must  His  longer 

always  regard  as  one  of  the  most  perfect  things  of  its  ^Airesford 

kind   in    English,   if   not   in    any  language.     The  actual  Pool." 

place,  it  is  true,  is  very  pretty  ;    and  nobody  would  ever 

think  that  it  is  anything  but  a  natural  lake,  though  as  a 

matter  of  fact   it   is  the  work  of  one  of  the  benighted 

priests  of  the  slothful  and  ignorant  Middle  Ages,  intended 

(and  for  ages  serving)  as  an  instrument  of  public  utility 

and  health.     But  Wither  has  heightened  its  beauty  a  little, 

though  quite   in   a  legitimate  and   Turneresque   manner, 

and  has  rendered  the  whole  thing  magisterially.      It  would 

be  impossible  to  suit  the  texture  and  colour  of  the  metrical 

garment  more  perfectly  to  the  body  of  the  picture. 

Still  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  not  the  decasyllabic  His  shorter, 
couplet,  enjambed  or  other,  which  gives  Wither  his  shrine 
in  the  west  front  of  the  Church  of  St.  Prosodia,  and  almost 
entitles  him  to  a  special  chapel  or  chantry  inside.  His 
claims  rest  on  the  shorter  distich,  which  is  so  faithful  to 
the  trochaic  cadence  and  the  seven-syllable  norm  that, 

1  For  pleasant  was  that  Pool ;  and  near  it  then 
Was  neither  rotten  marsh  nor  boggy  fen  ; 
It  was  not  overgrown  with  boisterous  sedge, 
Nor  grew  there  rudely,  then,  along  the  edge 
A  bending  willow,  nor  a  prickly  bush, 
Nor  broad-leaved  flag,  nor  reed,  nor  knotty  rush. 
But  here,  well  ordered,  was  a  grove  with  bowers  ; 
There,  grassy  plots  set  round  about  with  flowers. 
Here  you  might,  through  the  water,  see  the  land 
Appear  strewed  o'er  with  white  or  yellow  sand. 
Yon,  deeper  was  it ;  and  the  wind,  by  whiffs, 
Would  make  it  rise  and  wash  the  little  cliffs  ; 
On  which,  oft  pluming,  sate  unfrightened  then 
The  gaggling  wild  goose  and  the  snow-white  swan, 
With  all  those  flocks  of  fowl  which,  to  this  day, 
Upon  these  quiet  waters  breed  and  play. 

The  prosodic  note  of  this  (which  no  one  perhaps  has  later  caught  so  well 
as  Mr.  William  Morris)  is  not  enjambment,  so  much  as  a  varied  valuing  of 
pause  and  clause,  which  distributes  the  harmony  otherwise  than  merely  by 
couplets. 


124  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

although  it  has  the  very  same  line  which  more  generally 
serves  as  a  change  for  the  iambic  octosyllable,  and  is  prob- 
ably a  mere  derivative  therefrom,  seems  in  such  examples 
as  these,  with  the  patronage  of  Shakespeare  before  and 
over  it,  almost  to  deserve  a  separate  establishment  and 
title.1  The  name  just  mentioned,  and  others  mentioned 
before,  would  of  themselves  negative  any  idea  of  regarding 
Wither  as  the  chief  practitioner  of  this.  But  he  may  be 
the  most  representative  without  being  the  chief,  and  I 
think  he  is.  When  he  tries  others,  as  in  some  of  the 
"  Sonnets  "  of  Philarete,  he  is  at  best  unimportant ;  but 
when  he  returns  to  this,  either  arranged  simply  (and  best 
so),  or  alternately  rhymed,  or  set  in  stanza  form,  he  rises 
at  once.  It  is  his  mother-metre  :  he  cannot  touch  it  with- 
out deriving  strength  and  inspiration  from  the  touch. 
Even  here,  of  course,  he  cannot  conquer  his  nature,  and  put 
in  the  light  ringing  measure  the  fire  as  well  as  light  of 
Shakespeare  in  A  Midsummer  Nights  Dream  or  the 
Pericles  choruses,  the  quintessenced  elixir  of  Fletcher  or 
of  Herrick.  His,  even  more  than  Browne's,  is  really  a 
"  shepherd's  pipe,"  the  ideal  utterance  of  the  impossible 
but  agreeable  person  with  crooks  and  garlands,  in  the 
equally  impossible  but  agreeable  country  in  which  ribbons 
never  grow  faded  and  sheep  are  always  fresh  from  the 
washing.  Yet  he  does  it  with  the  least  possible  touch  of 
artificiality.  Wither  is  no  Watteau  :  he  may  not  have  so 
much  art,  but  he  has  much  less  flagrant  artifice.  And 
his  prosody  at  this  time  is  just  what  it  ought  to  be  to 
suit  Arcadia.  In  the  dreary  dotages  of  his  later  years  he 
returned  almost  exclusively  to  the  decasyllabic  couplet. 
A  few  remarks  on  the  prosody  of  two  other  poets  in 

1  One  example  is  hardly  better  than  another,  though  one  may  contain  an 
individually  happier  phrase  than  another.  This  (though  it  has  none  such) 
will  do : — 

Then  shall  cowardly  Despair  As  to  live  in  such  a  time, 

Let  the  most  unblemished  fair,  In  so  rude,  so  dull  a  clime, 

For  default  of  some  poor  art  Where  no  spirit  can  ascend 

Which  her  favour  may  impart,  High  enough  to  apprehend 

And  the  sweetest  Beauty  fade  Her  unprized  excellence, 

That  was  ever  born  or  made  ?  WThich  lies  hid  from  common  sense  ? 

Shall,  of  all  the  fair  ones,  she  Never  shall  a  stain  so  vile 

Only  so  unhappy  be  Blemish  this,  our  Poet's  Isle. 


CHAP,  in      SPENSERS  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     125 

this  period  who  have  no  special  prosodic  individuality  Sylvester  and 
may  be  added  for  completeness,  and  put  together  for Basse- 
convenience.  The  actual  verse  of  Sylvester l — perhaps  the 
best  read  (as  Englisher  of  "  Bartas  ")  of  any  English  poet 
during  the  first  half  of  the  seventeenth  century — is  by  no 
means  so  stiff  as  the  close  and  prim  laurel  wreath,  the 
palisading  effrontery  of  the  ruff,  and  the  severely  buck- 
rammed  doublet  of  his  portrait  might  suggest.  In  fact,  it 
is  rather  in  diction  than  in  versification  that  Sylvester  is 
grotesque  ;  and  it  is  noteworthy  that  his  verse  is  freest 
and  most  melodious  in  his  rather  frequent  original  inser- 
tions. He  is,  however,  a  strict  elider  and  apostrophator : 
and  the  couplet  which  he  chiefly  uses  is  of  the  inde- 
terminate Draytonian  sort,  ready  to  take  either  branch 
of  the  Y  by  turns,  but  not  taking  either  very  decidedly. 
In  wholly  original  pieces  he  gives  himself  more  licence  ; 
and  is  the  better  for  it.  In  fact,  Sylvester  is  one  of  those 
curious  persons  who  give  one  the  idea  that  they  might 
have  been  better  poets  than  they  were :  an  effect  at  least 
more  gracious  than  that  produced  by  the  other  class,  of 
whom  Beattie  is  an  excellent  example — who  would  have 
been  better  poets,  if  they  could.  Basse,  who  has  had  late 
admission2  to  the  Rules  of  the  Spenserian  Sanctuary,  shows 
at  his  prosodic  best  in  the  half  mock-heroic  poem  on  the 
Boarstall  Walnut  Tree  (where  his  rhyme -royal  rather 
reminds  one  of  Kynaston's  later  experiment  in  Leoline  and 
Sydanis}.  Indeed,  this  mixed  mode  seems  to  have  been 
his  forte,  though  he  practised  it  little.  The  two  songs  "  The 
Hunter's  Song"  and  "Tom-a-Bedlam"  are  not  contemptible; 
and  his  "  Sword  and  Buckler  " — a  defence  of  the  irregular 
profession  (as  it  has  been  called)  of  gentleman  serving-man 
— adopts  the  sixain  not  clumsily.  The  various  stanzas  of 
his  more  serious  poems  are  respectable  but  undistinguished. 

A  subject  of  considerable  interest  and  importance,  The  Scottish 
connecting  itself  with  something  that  we  saw  formerly,  ^^^er 
but  capable  of  being  sufficiently  handled  in  short  space,  and  Hannay. 

1  Ed.  Grosart,  "  Chertsey  Worthies  Library,"  printed  for  private  circula- 
tion, two  vols.,  1880. 

2  Thanks  to  Mr.  Warwick  Bond,  who  edited  him  (London,  1893). 


126  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

is  to  be  found  in  the  group  of  more  or  less  strongly 
Anglicised  Scottish  poets  who  represent  the  reign  of 
James  VI. — Sir  Robert  Ayton,  Drummond,  Lord  Ancram, 
Lord  Stirling,  and  just  at  the  end  of  the  Jacobean  and  at 
the  beginning  of  the  Caroline  period,  Patrick  Hannay. 
It  is  well  known,  and,  though  better  known  than  under- 
stood in  detail,  still  comprehensible  enough  generally,  that 
poetry  in  Scots  itself,  which  had  been  but  a  fading  flower 
for  a  long  time,  "wilted  off"  almost  immediately  after  the 
Union  of  the  Crowns.  I  believe  that  the  recent  studies 
and  discoveries  of  my  friend  Mr.  George  Stevenson  show 
that  the  process  of  Anglification  is  traceable  even  in 
Montgomerie.  In  the  quintet  above  named  it  is  simply 
accomplished.  A  rhyme  now  and  then  such  as  "  allow  " 
to  "  you  "  in  one  of  Ayton's  poems  (which  same  rhyme 
occurs  also  in  Hannay),  an  occasional  appearance  in  the 
latter  of  the  participial  -it  mainly  for  rhyme's  sake,  and  a 
few  Scots  oes  and  aes  may  meet  us,  but  they  are  quite 
exceptional.  And  it  is  worth  observing  that  though 
Ayton,  Stirling,  Ker  of  Ancram,  and  Hannay  seem  to  have 
chiefly  lived  with  the  Court  in  England,  Drummond  did 
not.  The  point,  however,  above  glanced  at,  is  the  peculiar 
accuracy  of  the  student  and  practitioner  in  a  half-strange 
language.  Ayton  1  is  as  regular  in  his  numbers  as  his 

1  I  loved  thee  once,  I'll  love  no  more, 

Thine  be  the  grief  as  is  the  blame ; 
Thou  art  not  what  thou  wast  before, 

What  reason  I  should  be  the  same  ? 
He  that  can  love  unloved  again, 
Hath  better  store  of  love  than  brain  : 
God  send  me  love  my  debts  to  pay, 
While  unthrifts  fool  their  love  away. 

I  do  confess  thou'rt  sweet,  but  find 

Thee  such  an  unthrift  of  thy  sweets — 
Thy  favours  are  but  like  the  wind, 

That  kisses  everything  it  meets. 
And  since  thou  canst  with  more  than  one, 
Thou'rt  worthy  to  be  kissed  by  none. 

What  means  this  strangeness  now  of  late 

Since  time  must  truth  approve  ? 
This  distance  may  consist  with  state, 

It  cannot  stand  with  love. 


CHAP,  in      SPENSER'S  FELLOWS  AND  FOLLOWERS     127 

friend  Ben  ;  Ker's  beautiful  sonnet  "  Sweet  solitary  life  " 
is  perfectly  smooth ;  the  long  stanzas  of  Hannay's  Philomela 
and  the  sixains  of  his  Sheretine  and  Mariana  very  rarely 
break  down  or  drag,  while  some  of  his  couplets  are  as 
much  of  the  pattern  that  pleased  the  eighteenth  century 
as  Fairfax's  or  even  Waller's. 

As  for  the  principals,  Drummond  is  one  of  the  most  Dmmmond. 
accomplished  verse  artists  of  a  very  accomplished  time. 
Indeed,  the  skill  and  sweetness  of  his  verse,  with  the 
frequent  felicity  of  his  diction,  go  far  to  compensate 
for — if  not  exactly  to  hide — the  unfortunate  frigidity 
of  feeling  which  mars  him,  and  of  which  one  unluckily 
becomes  the  more  sensible  the  oftener  one  reads  him. 
Some  of  his  sonnets  are,  for  everything  but  passion,  as 
beautiful  things  as  the  Elizabethan  period  can  produce, 
and  remind  one  curiously  of  those  of  Josephin  Soulary  and 
Jose  Maria  de  Heredia  in  our  days.  His  madrigals  are 
better  still  :  they  are  the  very  daintiest  of  sweetmeats, 
only  waiting  for  a  little  spirit  to  be  infused  into  them, 
after  the  fashion  suspected  of  the  Excise,  and  hateful  to 
teetotallers.  Indeed,  they  are  sometimes  (as  in  the  cases 
of  "  Phcebus,  arise !"  and  the  still  more  charming  celebration 
of  eyes  like  aquamarines)  so  sweet  to  eye  and  taste,  that 
one  can  dispense  with  intoxication.  He  is  always  best 
in  these  short  irregular  pieces,  where  the  power  of  prosody 
is  almost  supreme  ;  while  he  has  some  very  fine  combina- 
tions, occasionally  Platonic  in  tone. 

Alexander  Lord  Stirling,  with  less  lightness,  deftness,  Stirling. 
and  grace,  had  more  fire  in  his  interior.  The  octaves  of 
his  alarmingly  titled  Doomsday  are  resonantly  moulded, 
and,  more  than  any  other  tailed  octaves,  give  something 
of  the  sound  of  a  tail-docked  Spenserian.  The  Aurora 
sonnets,  with  rather  less  finish  than  Drummond's,  have 
more  "  cry,"  nor  are  the  varied  metres  of  the  songs  con- 
temptible. It  is  noteworthy  and  characteristic  that  Stirling 
is  one  of  the  last  poets  to  use  the  "  poulter's  measure." 
Here,  it  must  be  confessed,  he  does  not  get  out  of  the 
"  butterwoman's  rank";  but  then,  as  we  said  before,  very 
few  do. 


128  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

A  moment's  attention,  too,  should  be  given  to  the 
curious  choruses  of  Stirling's  most  untheatrical  plays. 
These  meditative  descants  constituted,  beyond  all  doubt, 
one  of  the  appeals  of  the  Senecan  tragedy  to  an  age 
which  was  nothing  if  not  thoughtful,  and  so,  opposed 
as  that  tragedy  was  to  the  whole  drift  of  English  dramatic 
taste,  induced  the  cultivation  of  the  form  now  and  then. 
I  certainly  do  not  wish  that  this  cultivation  had  been 
more  extensive,  yet  I  should  be  sorry  if  we  had  not  (an 
absurd  phrase,  but  with  a  meaning)  Monarchic  Tragedies, 
and  especially  their  choruses.  Whenever  a  man  finds  a 
form  which  exactly  suits  his  meaning,  or  a  meaning  which 
exactly  suits  the  form  that  he  chooses,  then  the  prosodic 
spheres  sing  loud  or  low  as  the  case  may  be.  I  do  not 
mean  to  say  that  they  sang  very  loud  at  this  achievement, 
but  I  think  they  sang. 

At  any  rate,  he,  like  the  others,  is  certainly  a  careful 
versifier,  and  helps  to  establish  the  general  proposition 
referred  to  above. 


NOTE  ON  THE  SATIRISTS 

A  NOTE  will  perhaps  suffice  on  one  point  connected  with  the 
serious  and  non-lyrical  poetry  of  the  Elizabethan  time  proper — 
the  roughness,  that  is  to  say,  of  the  couplet  used  by  the  satirists, 
Marston,  Hall,  and  others.  It  is  very  striking.  But  for  that 
same  reason  it  has  been  almost  more  noticed  than  any  other 
prosodic  fact  of  the  period;  and  if  not  a  universal,  a  pretty 
general  agreement  has  been  arrived  at  on  it.  This  is  to  the 
effect  that  the  apparently  deliberate  licence  and  roughness  of  the 
Roman  satirical  writers — Horace  to  a  great  extent,  but  Persius 
even  more, — in  respect  of  rhythm  and  diction,  was  either  deliber- 
ately copied  by  their  English  imitators  (who  certainly  to  a  great 
extent  followed  the  Roman  tone),  or  was  accepted  by  them  as  a 
sort  of  cloak  for  greater  prosodic  carelessness  than  they  showed 
in  other  respects.  The  most  interesting  and  important  case  of 
all — that  of  Donne — can  indeed  hardly  be  regarded  as  covered 
by  these  suppositions ;  but  Donne's  prosody  will  be  treated  as  a 
whole  at  the  close  of  the  next  chapter.  In  regard  to  Hall  and 
Marston  and  Lodge  and  Guilpin  the  hypothesis  will  serve, 
though  it  is  fair  to  observe  that  in  Lodge's  case — the  only  one 
which  is  completely  parallel  to  Donne's  as  being  that  of  a  satirist 
who  was  also  an  admirable  lyric  poet — the  discrepancy  of  the 
two  styles  is  not  nearly  so  great  as  in  Donne's. 


VOL.  II  129  K 


CHAPTER    IV 

ELIZABETHAN    LYRIC   AND    SONNET DONNE 

Contents  of  chapter — The  Phoenix  Nest — England's  Helicon  and 
Davison's  Poetical  Rhapsody — Music  and  prosody — The  Songs 
from  the  Plays — Those  from  the  Romances — And  from  the 
Song-books — Campion — His  "  versings  " — His  rhymed  poems 
— The  Sonnet -outburst — Community  of  its  phenomena — 
Instance  from  Zepheria — And  of  its  goodness — Method  of 
operation — Licences  and  variations — In  line-length — In  line- 
number — Other  freaks — Canzons,  madrigals,  etc. — Barnes — 
The  moral  of  sonnet  and  song — Jonson's  lyrics — The  Celia 
Song — The  epitaphs — Others — The  In  Memoriam  metre — The 
problem  of  Donne — His  double  prosodic  aspect — The  anarchy 
of  the  Satires — The  "  middle  "  poems — The  lyrics. 

Contents  of  IT  was  pointed  out  in  the  last  volume  that,  at  a  time 
chapter.  contemporary  with  Spenser,  if  not  necessarily  in  all  cases 
through  his  direct  influence,  a  great  change  comes  over 
the  miscellaneous  verse  that  we  find,  whether  in  so-called 
"  Miscellany,"  or  in  any  special  poet.  According  to  the 
mixed  mode,  which  has  been  sketched  in  the  Preface  of 
this  present  volume,  we  have  already  seen  something  of 
this  ;  but  we  must  now  fill  in  and  complete  the  outline. 
This  will  best  be  done  by  taking  up  first  the  actual 
Miscellanies  at  the  point  at  which  we  left  them — that  is 
to  say,  with  The  Phoenix  Nest;  then  by  noticing  the 
prosodically  most  interesting  of  the  scattered  lyrics  of  the 
time  in  Romance  and  Drama  and  Song-book  ;  then  by 
dwelling  a  little  on  the  great  sonnet-outburst  of  the  decade 
mainly  succeeding  the  Armada  ;  and  lastly,  by  considering 
in  particular  the  lyrical  work  of  the  two  greatest  of  the 
younger  Elizabethans,  Jonson  and  Donne,  whose  influence, 
and  in  part  their  production,  reaches  forward  to  the 

130 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  131 

"  time  of  lilies,"  the  late  summer  of  the  whole  Elizabethan 
period  in  the  wide  sense,  the  extraordinary  outburst  of 
Jacobean  and  Caroline  song  which,  in  its  perfect  blossom- 
ing, will  not  come  under  our  notice  till  the  next  Book. 
In  Donne's  case  one  of  those  licences  of  exception  in 
method  of  which  readers  have  been  forewarned  will  be 
taken  ;  and  his  whole  prosody  will  be  considered  together, 
for  reasons  which  the  treatment  must,  if  it  can,  make 
clear  and  justify. 

The  identification  of  "  R.  S.,"  the  editor  of  The  Phoenix  The  Phoenix 
Nest,  and  of  the  further  initials  which  indicate  or  conceal  Nest' 
the   authors    of   the   fourteen    most    specially    "woorthie 
wurkes "    that    compose    this    remarkable    collection,    is 
fortunately    not    in    the   least    necessary  to   the    present 
inquiry.     Whether   "  R.   S. "   was    the   ghost    of   Shake- 
speare's   grandfather,    and    "  W.    S. "    Shakespeare    him- 
self, are  questions   which   we   may   leave    to    those   who 
like   them.      The   prosodic   and   poetic    facts    fortunately 
remain. 

The  opening  pieces  l  on  Sidney's  death  are  not  of  the 
most  immortal  garlands  devoted  to  the  tombeau  of 
Astrophel ; 2  and  some  not  immediately  following  verses 
of  "  N.  B. "  (whether  Nicholas  Breton  or  No  Body)  retain 
the  blunted  music  of  the  Turbervillian  period.  But  with 
the  "  Excellent  Ditties  of  Divers  Kinds  and  Rare  Inven- 
tions written  by  Sundry  Gentlemen  "  we  come  to  metal 
more  attractive.  The  opening  sixains  remind  us  of  the 
overture  of  the  Shepherd's  Kalendar  thirteen  years  earlier, 
and  are  not  equal  to  it.  But,  with  the  next  piece  in 
quatrains  of  trochaic  dimeter,  they  are  worth  sampling.3 

1  I  follow  the  Heliconia  reprint,  vol.  ii.,  London,  1815. 

2  The  second,  however,  has  the  quatrain  with  inclosed  rhyme  abba,  which, 
though  decasyllabic,  is  always  to  be  noticed  when  it  comes  early,  for  the  sake 
of  its  In  Memoriam  derivative. 

3  Weep  you,  my  lines,  for  sorrow  while  I  write  ; 

For  you  alone  may  manifest  my  grief ; 
Your  numbers  must  my  endless  woes  recite, 

Such  woes  as  wound  my  soul  without  relief, 
Such  bitter  woes,  as  whoso  would  disclose  them 
Must  cease  to  talk,  for  heart  can  scarce  suppose  them. 

There  is  some  "  fingering  "  here.     But  there  is  more  in  this — 


132  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

This  and  still  more  the  next  (whether  Lodge's  or  not)  show 
us  that  their  author  had  the  secret — that  the  ball  is  opened, 
that  the  dancing  has  begun,  and  that  the  days  of  stumbling 
and  hirpling  are  over.  And  there  is  no  relapse  as  long 
as  "  T.  L.  gent  "  is  with  us.  The  beautiful  short  line,  like  the 
Adonic  of  a  Sapphic,  added  to  "  All  day  I  weep  my  weary 
woes  "  ; l  the  graceful  wasp-waisted  sixains  of  "  Oh  woods  ! 
unto  your  walks  my  body  hies  "  ; 2  the  actual  Sapphics,3  at 
least  in  intention  (which  escape  the  jauntiness  or  the  awk- 
wardness of  the  usual  English  travesty  of  that  metre  almost 
as  well  as  Greville's)  ;  and  the  delightful  carillon  of  "  My 
bonny  lass,"4 — all  show  that  we  are  really  in  the  rose- 
garden,  that  the  carols  in  the  old  sense  are  begun.  Things 
less  good — things  positively  bad — follow.  But  store  of  good 


Muses  !  help  me  :  sorrow  swarmeth, 

Eyes  are  fraught  with  seas  of  languish, 
Hapless  hope  my  solace  harmeth, 

Mind's  repast  is  bitter  anguish. 

Let  it  be  remembered  that  "languish"  and  "anguish"  were  not  such  old 
partners  then. 

1  All  day  I  weep  my  weary  woes, 

Then  when  that  night  approacheth  near, 
And  every  one  his  eyes  doth  close, 
And  passed  pains  no  more  appear — 
I  change  my  cheer. 

2  Oh  woods  !  unto  your  walks  my  body  hies, 
To  loose  the  traitorous  bands  of  'ticing  Love, 
Where  hills,  where  herbs,  where  flowers 
Their  native  moisture  pours 

From  forth  their  tender  stalks,  to  help  mine  eyes  ; 
Yet  their  united  tears  may  nothing  move — 

where  it  is  again  just  as  well  to  remember  that  "flowers — pours"  was  not 
recognised  as  a  false  concord  by  the  grammar  of  the  time,  nor  as  a  false 
rhyme  by  its  prosody. 

3  The  fatal  star,  that  at  my  birthday  shined, 
Were  it  of  Jove,  or  Venus  in  her  brightness, 
All  sad  effects,  sour  fruits  of  Love,  divined 
In  my  love's  lightness. 

4  My  bonny  lass,  thine  eye, 

So  sly 

Hath  made  me  sorrow  so — 
Thy  crimson  cheeks,  my  dear, 

So  clear, 
Have  so  much  wrought  my  woe,  etc. 


CHAP,  iv     ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  133 

sonnets  come  to  comfort  us,  and  some  common  measure, 
"  The  time  when  first  I  fell  in  love,"  which,  in  tone  as  well 
as  in  tune,  is  a  far-off  forecast  of  Suckling.  Nor  will  the 
fact  that  the  book  closes  with  some  Sapphics,  quite  as 
bad  as  Southey's,  remove  the  comfortable  impression. 
Qui  a  bu,  boira  ;  and  others  will  follow  him  in  drinking 
now  that  the  fountain  is  once  unsealed. 

Of  the  three  collections  published  in  the  last  years  of  England's 
the  Queen,  England's  Parnassus,  being  merely  an  anthology,  ^vison's1 
or  rather  a  commonplace  book  from  published  authors,  Poetical 
need  not  delay  us  long.  But  it  is  a  prosodic  document  a 
of  the  highest  importance  when  we  remember  how 
absolutely  impossible  it  would  have  been  to  get  together 
anything  like  such  a  record  of  prosodic  accomplishment 
only  twenty  years  earlier ;  and  what  an  astounding 
contrast  would  be  presented  by  a  parallel  book  dating 
not  twenty  but  a  hundred  years  sooner,  and  representing 
the  entire  English  prosody  of  1400-1500.  England's 
Helicon,  on  the  other  hand,  and  the  Poetical  Rhapsody? 
but  especially  the  latter,  contain  actual  new  stuff.  As 
before,  the  authorship  matters  little,  but  the  contrast  of 
The  Phoenix  Nest  with  the  earlier  miscellanies  is  here 
repeated  on  a  larger  scale,  and  in  more  striking  and 
intenser  fashion.  The  waters  of  this  Helicon  rise  from 
many  springs,  some  of  which  we  have  traced  to  their 
actual  founts  already  ;  but  almost  everywhere  they  run 
softly  and  smoothly,  with  no  chafing  against  obnoxious 
pebbles  or  sand-banks.  Even  poor  abused  "  Bar.  Young  " 
writes,  so  far  as  numbers  go,  as  much  better  poets  could 
hardly  have  written  a  generation  earlier.  His  notion  of 
expanding  common  measure,  or  rather  sandwiching  a  deca- 
syllabic quatrain  between  two  "  C.M.'s  "  in  "  Melisea  her 
Song,"  is  no  bad  one.2  Whosoever  "  Shepherd  Tony  "  was, 

1  For  easy  access  to  both  of  which,  as  to  much  else  in  the  contents  of  this 
chapter,  we  have  to  thank  Mr.  A.  H.  Bullen,  whose  edition  of  the  Helicon 
originally  appeared  in  1887,  and  that  of  the  Rhapsody  in  1891. 

2  Like  the  rest  of  Young's  verse  it  comes  from  his  translation — a  most 
influential  one — of  Montemayor's  Diana.      Poetically,  of  course,  it  is  no 
great  thing — hardly  anything  at  all.     But  the  "twist"  of  the  metre  has,  to 
my  ear,  a  rather  remarkable  effect,  as  imaging  the  change  from  mocking  to 
seriousness  and  back  again  : — 


134  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

he  had  not  much  to  learn  prosodically  ;  and  most  of  the 
others  had  shown,  or  were  to  show,  this  fact  elsewhere. 
And  it  is  still  more  the  case  in  Davison's  inestimable 
Rhapsody,  with  its  mysterious  "  A.  W."  and  its  many 
known  masters  ;  so  much  so,  indeed,  that  we  may  do 
better  to  generalise  only  on  these,  and  on  the  songs  from 
other  sources  which  have  been  mentioned. 

Music  and        One  point  of  extreme  importance  may  be  dealt  with 
prosody.    ^^      ^e  jiave  seen  ^^  jn  fae  period  of  the  novitiate 

before  Spenser,  music  undoubtedly  did  good  by  suggesting 
fairly  complicated  but  harmoniously  concerted  measures  ; 
yet  that  in  some  cases,  in  consequence  of  their  prosodic 
nonage,  the  poets  confused  musical  and  poetical  music, 
failing  to  achieve  the  latter  in  their  anxiety  to  suit  the 
former.  In  the  time  to  which  we  have  now  come  there 
can,  of  course,  be  no  doubt  that  the  popular  fancy  for 
music  was  at  least  equally  powerful  as  a  provoker.  The 
cittern  in  the  barber's  shop  was  no  bad  sign  for  prosody  ; 

Young  shepherd,  turn  aside  and  move 

Me  not  to  follow  thee  ; 
For  I  will  neither  kill  with  love, 

Nor  love  shall  not  kill  me. 

Since  I  will  live  and  never  favour  show, 

Then  die  not,  for  my  love  I  will  not  give — 

For  I  will  never  have  thee  love  me  so 
As  I  do  mean  to  hate  thee  while  I  live. 

That  [then  ?]  since  the  lover  so  doth  prove 

His  death,  as  thou  dost  see, 
Be  bold,  I  will  not  kill  with  love, 

Nor  love  shall  not  kill  me  ! 

For  a  still  more  skilful  and  much  more  elaborate  composition,  with  poetry 
added,  take  this  of  A.  W.  the  Unknown,  from  the  Rhapsody,  ii.  79  : — 

When  Venus  saw  Desire  must  die, 

Whom  high  Disdain 

Had  justly  slain, 

For  killing  Truth  with  scornful  eye  : 
The  earth  she  leaves  and  gets  her  to  the  sky ; 

Her  golden  hair  she  tears  ; 

Black  weeds  of  woe  she  wears  ; 
For  help  unto  her  father  doth  she  cry  : 

Who  bids  her  stay  a  space 

And  hope  for  better  grace. 

These  will  illustrate  the  remarks  which  follow  in  the  text  with  at  least  a 
bare  sufficiency. 


CHAP,  iv     ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  135 

and  we  have  the  plain  fact  that,  of  the  immense  and 
marvellously  good  lyrical  production  here  surveyed,  a 
large  part  actually  appeared  as  with,  or  for,  musical 
setting  ;  that  the  songs  in  the  plays  and  romances 
(another  large  part)  were  deliberately  intended  to  be  sung  ; 
and  that  probably  a  very  large  proportion  of  what  were 
published  as  "  poems  "  had  the  same  destination,  and 
reached  it.  Yet  we  find  almost  universally  that,  whether 
in  the  songs  certainly  written  for  music  or  in  those  not  so 
written,  Prosody  has  learnt  how  to  reduce  the  inferior1 
art  to  its  proper  functions  —  those  of  an  accidental  and 
unnecessary  companion.  From  the  "  T.  L."  of  The 
Phoenix  Nest  onwards  we  see  that  she  has  taught  these 
writers  to  dispense  with  viol  or  flute,  though  they  may  be 
willing  enough  to  join  with  these  —  to  carry  their  own 
music  in  the  words,  not  to  beg  it  from  inarticulate  charity. 

The  best  (because  the  longest)  known  of  the  classes  The  Songs 


into  which  this  wonderful  concert  is  divided  is  composed  e 

of  the  Songs  from  the  Plays.  These  could  at  no  time 
escape  notice,  because,  even  before  Shakespeare  had  come 
fully  into  his  kingdom,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  were 
popular,  and  their  work  happens  to  contain  many  of  the 
best  songs  of  all  next  to  his.  Jonson,  perhaps  from  a 
scruple  ever  so  little  pedantic,  did  not  use  the  lyric  power 
which  he  possessed  very  much  in  his  regular  dramas, 
though  there  are,  of  course,  exceptions,  headed  by  the 
famous  — 

Queen  and  Huntress,  chaste  and  fair, 

which  has,  in  its  prosodic  movement,  the  stately  splendour 
of  the  goddess  herself  at  her  fullest  and  most  undisturbed. 
His  masques  are  naturally  full  of  lyrics,  from  the  comic 
motion  (very  early  in  this  kind)  of  "  Buzz,  quoth  the  blue 
fly  "  onwards.  These  pieces  in  the  masques,  and  some 
elsewhere,  are  valuable  for  the  history,  not  of  trisyllabic 
feet,  but  of  actual  trisyllabic  measures,  which  we  shall 

1  Inferior  :  being  not  necessarily  human  as  poetry  is,  and  even  inferior  in 
humanity.  For  birds  beat  man  in  all  but  volume  of  sound  ;  unless,  as  Sir 
Thomas  Browne  might  have  put  it,  "he  stayeth  himself  with  metallic  and 
intestinal  contrivances/' 


136  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

have  to  attack  in  the  Interchapter  ;  and  there  is  perhaps 
none  more  so  than  the  very  subtle  and  beautiful — 

See  the  chariot  at  hand  here  of  Love, 

which  was  only  partly  and  grudgingly  imparted  to  The 
Devil  is  an  Ass.1  But  as  the  Elizabethan  dramatists 
were  one  by  one  reinstated  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  still  more  fully  in  the  nineteenth,  the  extraordinary 
riches  and  beauty  of  their  work  in  this  department  came 
more  and  more  fully  into  view.  Daniel's  rather  prim 
solemnity  in  his  regular  poems  becomes  graceful  and 
almost  arch  in — 

Love  is  a  sickness  full  of  woes  ; 

and  the  less  polished  but  rarer  note  of  Dekker  comes  out 
incomparably  in — 

Cold's  the  wind  and  wet's  the  rain 

(one  of  the  very  finest  of  all),  with  "  Sweet  Content "  and 
"  Golden  Numbers  "  and  other  things,  for  the  mere  possi- 
bility and  "  false  dawn  "  of  which  we  have  to  look  back 
to  Alisoun  and  her  company  at  the  beginning  of  the 
fourteenth  century.  And  so  it  goes  on  till  the  very  last, 
till  Shirley's  again  famous  and  strangely  adequate  swan- 
song  of — 

The  glories  of  our  blood  and  state. 

Nowhere  would  it  more  be  pleasing  to  delay  and  dally 

1  Compare  the  play,  II.  ii.,  and  Charis,  No.  iv.     The  stanza,  which  does 
not  appear  in  the  former  place,  may  be  given  here  : — 

See  the  chajriot  at  hand  |  here  of  Love  ! 

Wherein  |  my  La|dy  rijdeth. 
Each  that  draws  |  is  a  swan  |  or  a  dove, 
And  well  |  the  car  |  Love  guijdeth. 
As  she  goes,  j  all  hearts  |  do  du  |  ty 

Unto  |  her  beau|ty  ; 
And  enamj  cured  do  wish,  |  so  they  might 

But  enjoy  |  such  a  sight 
That  they  still  |  were  to  run  |  by  her  side 
Th[o]rough  ponds,  |  th[o]rough  seas,  j  whither  she  |  would  ride. 

("  Through,"  as  often,  is  probably  to  be  valued  "  thorough,"  and  "  chariot " 
was  generally  "chawyot"  or  "charret.") 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  137 

with  these  delightful  things,1  and  to  show  the  cunning  as 
well  as  the  charm  of  each  of  them.  But  that  way  lies  no 
end  ;  and,  besides,  they  are  now  fortunately  well  or  fairly 
well  known.  Only,  perhaps,  one  may  point  out  that 
nothing  illustrates  more  remarkably  the  contrast  of  the 
crumbling  away  of  dramatic  blank  verse,  and  the  holding 
on  of  lyric,  than  these  songs  in  the  later  plays,  as,  for 
instance,  the  faultless  "  Why  so  pale  ? "  and  "  No !  no  ! 
fair  heretic "  of  Suckling  in  the  midst  of  the  audacious 
doggerel  of  the  dialogue  of  Aglaura. 

The  next  division — the  Songs  and  inset  Poems  from  Those  from 
the  Romances — was  long  quite  unknown,  or  known  only  tb 
by  a  very  few  students  ;  but  the  late  Mr.  Bell  made  a 
good  deal  of  it  accessible  fifty  or  sixty  years  ago,  and 
Mr.  Bullen  carried  on  the  good  work  more  recently. 
This  division  has  the  special  interest  that  it  is  practically 
all  early — the  work  of  men  like  Breton,  Lodge,  and 
Greene,  who  are  in  the  strict  and  not  in  the  large  sense 
Elizabethans,  and  who  even  represent  to  some  extent  the 
prae-Spenserian  time  and  circumstances  ;  not  to  mention 
Sidney,  who  has  been  dealt  with.  These  are  literally  the 
first  sprightly  runnings  of  the  new-broached  cask — the 
first  and  far  from  discordant  tunings-up  of  the  new-strung 
lyre.  They  thus  coincide  (and  are  in  some  cases  identical) 
with  the  constituents  of  the  later  Miscellanies,  and  exhibit 
the  same  prosodic  stage.  Greene  and  Lodge  were  evi- 
dently such  born  singers  that  a  ruthlessly  experimental 
mind  might  almost  long  to  transfer  their  birth  to  a 
different  period,  and  see  what  would  happen.  But  in 
this,  as  in  other  cases,  it  can  but  be  profane  to  think 
them  anything  but  what  they  are. 

Last  known,  but  certainly  not  least  worth   knowing,  And  from  the 
are  the   contributions   of  the  actual    Song-books   of   the   ong"  ' 
period,  which,   until    Mr.    Arber   and    Mr.    Bullen   began 
to  exhume  them  early  in  the  last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth 
century,    were    literally    aurum    irrepertum.       I    suppose 

1  A  good  number  of  them,  after  the  very  earliest,  and  down  to  Dryden, 
will  be  found  in  the  present  writer's  collection  of  Seventeenth  Century  Lyrics 
(London,  1892),  and,  of  course,  also  in  most  English  anthologies,  whether 
they  deal  exclusively  or  inclusively  with  the  period. 


138  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

musicians  knew  them  ;  but  musicians  have  seldom  known 
anything  about  poetry  ;  and  I  suppose  lovers  of  poetry, 
seeing  that  they  were  "  for  music,"  and  remembering  the 
modern  "  song  to  be  sung,"  shuddered  and  passed  them 
by.  Yet  it  is  strange  that  they  should  have  been  so 
long  overlooked ;  more  particularly  since  they  furnish 
one  poet  who  is  certainly  no  ordinary  one,  and  who  must 
be  dealt  with  separately  in  a  moment.  But  they  have 
by  no  means  merely  to  speak  by  "  their  prior,"  though 
that  prior  be  Campion. 

It  has,  since  their  disinterment,  struck  everybody  as 
the  most  remarkable  proof  existing  of  the  irresistible 
poeticalness  of  the  time,  not  merely  that  there  should  be 
so  much  that  is  exquisite  here,  but  that  so  much  of  that 
exquisite  stuff  should  be  all  but  anonymous,  or  even 
wholly  so.  It  seems  impossible  that  mere  music-masters 
or  editors  like  Weekes  and  Wilbye,  Byrd  and  Dowland, 
Rossiter  and  Jones,  should  be  authors  of  the  ravishing 
things  they  published  ;  but  if  they  were  not,  who  were  ? 
When  Captain  Tobias  Hume  wanted  words  for  an  air, 
did  he,  at  a  spare  moment,  sit  down  and  write,  or  open 
the  window  and  invite  the  first-corner  to  compose,  such  a 
thing  as  that  incomparable  "  Fain  would  I  change  that 
note,"  to  the  second  stanza  of  which  Mr.  Bullen  has  done 
justice  by  inscribing  it  on  the  portal  of  his  anthology? 
But  we  do  not  know  ;  and  I  suppose  we  never  shall. 

Our  business,  however — as  I  have  to  remind  the 
reader,  tediously  to  myself,  and  no  doubt  more  tediously 
to  him, — is  not  so  much  with  the  poetry  itself  as  with 
the  form  of  it.  And  once  more  also  we  see  in  these 
song-books  how  "  vulgate  "  that  form  was — how  easily  all 
and  sundry,  or  at  least  a  good  many,  could  throw  thought, 
original  or  borrowed,  rare  or  commonplace,  into  shapes 
and  garbs  which  poets  infinitely  superior  to  them  had  not 
dreamt  of,  or  at  any  rate  had  not  attempted  earlier.  For 
instance,  that  stanza  just  referred  to.1  Take  away  any 

1  O  Love,  they  wrong  thee  much 

That  say  thy  sweet  is  bitter, 
When  thy  rich  fruit  is  such 
As  nothing  can  be  sweeter. 


CHAP,  iv     ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  139 

of  its  prosodic  distinctions — the  masculine  rhyme  alternat- 
ing with  feminine  in  the  opening  quatrain,  the  restriction 
of  the  sixain  that  follows  to  sixes  and  fours,  with  feminine 
rhyme  again  in  the  third  and  sixth — and  all  the  sweet- 
ness will  be  gone.  Reverse  or  alter  (I  have  tried  the 
experiment)  with  the  least  possible  alterations,  and  with 
sounder  rhymes  than  "  bitter "  and  "  sweeter."  Actum 
est !  A  few  other  examples  might  be  indicated  of  other 
pieces  where  the  prosodic  character  is  clearly  responsible 
for  much,  if  not  most,  of  the  charm  ;  but  it  will  be  better 
to  make  a  somewhat  closer  examination  of  Campion 
himself  and  of  his  verses  in  both  kinds,  than  to  select 
examples  from  the  herd,  however  fair.  As  a  prosodic 
theorist,  his  place  will  be  in  the  next  chapter  ;  but  here  he 
shall  be  saved  by  his  works. 

The  "  monstrous  beauties,"  as  La  Harpe  might  have  Campion. 
called  them,  may  be  considered  first.1  Constructed 
(y.  inf.}  on  a  system  which,  though  mistaken,  does  not, 
like  that  of  most  "  versers,"  from  Watson  downwards,  fly  His 
deliberately  in  the  face  of  the  harmony  of  the  English 
language,  there  is  nothing  to  say  against  them  except 
that,  in  the  first  place,  they  are  positively  things  a  la 
chinoise,  unnaturally  warped  and  cramped  ;  while,  in  the 
second,  they  deprive  themselves,  with  an  equally  unnatural 
asceticism,  of  the  congenial  grace  of  rhyme.  The  five- 
foot  "  licentiate  "  iambics  2  of  the  overture  "  To  his  Book," 
and  the  longer  and  later  inset  "  So  numbers,"  etc.,  whether 
the  reasoning  that  precedes  them  be  good  or  bad,  are 
fine  blank  verse  of  a  type  between  the  stiffer  one  of  the 

Fair  house  of  joy  and  bliss, 
Where  truest  pleasure  is, 

I  do  adore  thee  ; 
I  know  thee  what  thou  art, 
I  serve  thee  from  my  heart, 

And  fall  before  thee. 

1  I  use,  of  course,  Mr.  Bullen's  Works  of  Thomas  Campion  (London, 
privately  printed,  1889).  The  classical  experiments  are  scattered  as  examples 
through  the  Observations  (see  next  chapter). 

2  Whither  thus  hastes  my  little  book  so  fast  ? 
To  Paul's  Churchyard.     What  ?  in  those  cells  to  stand, 
With  one  leaf  like  a  rider's  cloak  put  up 
To  catch  a  termer  ?  etc. 


140  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

University  Wits  and  the  full  licence  of  Shakespeare — the 
inscrutable  smile  on  whose  face,  by  the  way,  must  have 
been  more  inscrutable  still  when  he  read  Dr.  Campion, 
and  found  that  he  had  been  doing  everything  he  ought 
to  do  on  principles  very  different  from  the  doctor's. 
Nearly  all  Campion's  licences  are,  in  his  own  words, 
"  good  and  answerable,"  as  they  are  applied.  His  iambic 
dimeters  l  want  only  rhyme  to  be  very  charming,  and  his 
trochaics  2  have  the  right  dropping  cadence ;  but  all  these 
are  merely  from  his  own  point  of  view  "  filthy  rags  " — 
they  might  have  been  written  by  his  adversary,  Daniel, 
or  by  anybody  else  who  could  write  them.  It  is  when 
he  comes  to  his  English  Elegiacs 3  that  he  breaks  down. 
It  is  impossible  to  imagine  a  more  arrhythmic  rhythm  than 
this — the  reader's  voice  trips  and  stumbles,  and  wallows 
almost  as  much  as  in  fifteenth -century  poetry,  except 
that  the  individual  feet  are  smooth  enough.  Probably 
(though  it  is  rather  a  habit  of  "  new  "  prosodists)  nobody 
ever  "  damned  himself  in  confidence "  more  completely 
than  Campion  does  here.  We  really  want  nothing  more. 
The  system  must  be  wrong  when  such  a  workman  pro- 
duces such  work  on  it 

1  These  are  catalectic,  and  really  trochaic,  for,  in  the  apparently  irresistible 
spirit  of  perversity  which  besets  him,  he  gives  no  examples  here  of  the  pure 
iambic  dimeter.     Sometimes  he  gives  the  others  by  themselves,  as  in — 

Raving  war,  begot 

In  the  thirsty  sands,  etc. ; 

sometimes  bouqueted  in  stanzas,  as  in  "  Rose-cheeked  Laura." 

2  With   him  the    trochaic  must   be  acatalectic,   whether   shorter,   as  the 
curiously  charming — 

Follow,  follow, 
Though  with  mischief 
Armed  like  whirlwind 
How  she  flies  still, 

which  he  calls  an  Anacreontic  ;  or  longer,  as  in — 

Cease,  fond  wretch,  to  love,  so  oft  deluded. 

3  Constant  to  none,  but  ever  false  to  me, 
Traitor  still  to  love  through  thy  false  desires, 
Not  hope  of  pity  now,  nor  vain  redress, 
Turns  my  grief  to  tears  and  renewed  laments. 

I  only  know  one  effect  similar  to  this — when  the  tension  of  a  type-writer 
goes  wrong,  and  the  carriage  drags  against  the  teeth  of  the  rack. 


CHAP,  iv     ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  141 

His  strictly  lyrical  measures,  his  ditties  and  odes, 
include  "  Rose-cheeked  Laura " l  herself,  who  would  be 
charming  with  any  dress  in  any  company,  but  how  much 
more  with  her  natural  graces  of  rhyme  restored  ;  while 
as  for  other  things  quoted  above,  they  are  quite  usual 
English  verse,  and  require  no  new  principles  to  justify 
them.  They  are  passing  graceful ;  would  they  were 
rhymed  ! 

"Oh  how  |  comely  it  |  is  and  |  how  rejviving"  (is  His  rhymed 
not  the  appropriateness  of  this  rather  agreeable  ?)  to  turn  poe 
from  these  poor  girls  with  their  backboards  on,  and  their 
castanets  taken  from  them,  to  the  free,  the  most  beautified 
bevy  of  the  Airs  !  When  we  read  "  My  sweetest  Lesbia  "  2 
(which  is  even  sweeter  than  the  original),  we  have  not 
got  to  refer  to  the  book,  like  knitting  persons,  to  see  if 
we  have  knitted  this  and  dropped  that  as  per  rule.  The 
verses  flow  as  though  they  could  and  would  flow  for  ever 
— reducible  indeed  to  the  broad  and  simple  laws  of  now 
thoroughly  established  English  prosody,  but  needing  and 
brooking  nothing  else.  And  when  at  the  other  end 
we  come  to  "  Your  fair  looks  urge  my  desire " 3  (such  a 
different  measure  and  such  a  cunning  one,  yet,  once  more, 
so  purely  and  genuinely  English,  with  such  unimaginable 

1  Rose-cheeked  Laura,  come ; 
Sing  thou  smoothly  with  thy  beauty's 
Silent  music,  either  other 
Sweetly  gracing. 

2  My  sweetest  Lesbia,  let  us  live  and  love, 
And  though  the  sager  sort  our  deeds  reprove, 
Let  us  not  weigh  them  :  Heaven's  great  lamps  do  dive 
Into  their  west,  and  straight  again  revive  ; 
But  soon  as  once  set  is  our  little  light, 
Then  must  we  sleep  one  everduring  night. 

3  Your  fair  looks  urge  my  desire  ; 

Calm  it,  sweet,  with  love  ! 
Stay  ;  oh  why  will  you  retire  ? 

Can  you  churlish  prove  ? 

If  love  may  persuade, 
Love's  pleasures,  dear,  deny  not. 
Here  is  a  grove  secured  with  shade, 

O  then  be  wise  and  fly  not  ! 

(I  do  not  mark  this  for  scansion,  because  there  are  two  good  and  interest- 
ing ways  possible.) 


142  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

charms  of  rhyme),  it  is  a  question  whether  the  end  of 
this  thing  is  better  than  the  beginning  or  not,  and  there 
is  really  nothing  to  do  but  to  turn  to  that  beginning  and 
go  through  the  whole  again.  Perhaps,  indeed,  we  shall 
meet  nothing  more  subtly  sweet  and  sweetly  subtle  than 
the  combination  of  monosyllabic  feet  with  longer,  of  double 
rhymes  with  single,  in  the  piece  just  mentioned.  But  we 
shall  find  many  to  match  it. 

Contrast  it,  for  instance,  with  a  very  early  one,  "  I  care 
not  for  these  ladies."  l  The  general  prosodic  instruments 
of  the  effect  are  just  the  same — variation  of  iamb  and 
trochee,  of  double  and  single  rhyme,  and  no  rhyme  at  all  ; 
but  they  are  differently  disposed  and  applied,  and  the 
effect  is  proportionately  varied.  Taking  him  altogether, 
it  is  perhaps  in  his  use  of  the  trochee  that  Campion  is 
most  distinguished  and  most  happy.  He  hardly  ever 
overdoses  us  with  it  as  Milton  (I  fear  it  must  be  admitted) 
sometimes  seems  to  do.  Yet  he  does  not  in  the  least 
depend  on  it,  or  on  the  double  rhyme,  which  is  so  closely 
connected  therewith.  Such  a  piece,  for  instance,  as 
"  When  to  her  lute  Corinna  sings,"  is  rigidly  iambic, 
decasyllabic,  and  non-redundant ;  yet  Ben  himself  has 
left  us  nothing  more  beautiful.  And  the  very  next,2  as 
it  happens,  is  more  complicated  even  than  it  looks — full 
of  reverses,  extensions,  and  contractions  of  rhythm,  yet 
all  most  artfully  managed.  Perhaps,  indeed,  some  may 
object  that  it  is  a  little  too  artful — too  much  of  a  "  lesson," 
a  diploma-piece  to  show  cleverness,  and  not  quite  enough 

1  I  care  not  for  these  ladies 
That  must  be  wooed  and  prayed : 
Give  me  kind  Amaryllis, 
The  wanton  country-maid. 
Nature  art  disdaineth, 
Her  beauty  is  her  own. 
Her  when  we  court  and  kiss 
She  cries  "  Forsooth  let  go  ! " 
But  when  we  come  where  comfort  is, 
She  never  will  say  "  No  !  " 

2  Follow  thy  fair  sun,  unhappy  shadow  ! 
Though  thou  be  black  as  night, 
And  she  made  all  of  light, 
Yet  follow  thy  fair  sun,  unhappy  shadow  ! 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  143 

of  a  finally  fused,  smooth  and  round,  accomplishment.  It 
is,  however,  too  beautiful  to  be  praised  merely  by 
allowance,  though  it  perhaps  explains  in  a  way  why 
Campion  fell  in  love  with  those  "  strange  women "  the 
versing  creatures.  But  who  that  feels  the  charm  of 
English  prosody  at  all  shall  speak  with  measure  of 
"  Follow  your  saint  "  ? l  Here  we  have  practically  every- 
thing— audacious  and  unfailing  conjunction  of  trochee 
and  iamb,  bold  trisyllabic  substitution  with  incomparable 
effect,  extraordinary  variation  of  pause,  and  telescoping 
of  lines,  all  quite  miraculous  in  effect.  What  such  a 
thing  as  this  can  want  with  an  "  air  "  it  is  difficult  to  say  ; 
it  is  very  easy  to  see  that  the  air,  whatever  it  is,  would 
have  no  little  difficulty  in  matching  the  ineffable  beauty 
of  the  prosodic  accompaniment. 

The  inchoate  and  extremely  inferior  version  of  "  Your 
fair  looks,"  in  the  First  Book,  is  of  the  first  interest  as 
showing  how  Campion  worked  up  his  verse-melodies. 
But  do  we  want  to  know  what  he  can  do  with  that 
famous  prosodic  weapon  the  refrain,  and  in  an  unusual 
place  too  ?  "  Hark  all  you  ladies  that  do  sleep," 2 
with  its  repeated  second  line — 

The  fairy  queen  Proserpina, 

will  show  it.  The  rhythm-scheme  on  the  whole  is  of  the 
quaintest ;  one  almost  thinks  that  Campion  must  have 

1  Follow  your  saint,  follow  with  accents  sweet ! 
Haste  you,  sad  notes,  fall  at  her  flying  feet  ! 
There,  wrapped  in  cloud  of  sorrow,  pity  move, 
And  tell  the  ravisher  of  my  soul,  I  perish  for  her  love. 
But  if  she  scorns  my  never-ceasing  pain, 
Then  burst  with  sighing  in  her  sight,  and  ne'er  return  again  ! 

2  Hark  all  you  ladies  that  do  sleep  ! 

The  fairy  queen  Proserpina 
Bids  you  awake  and  pity  them  that  weep. 
You  may  do  in  the  dark 

What  the  day  doth  forbid  ; 
Fear  not  the  dogs  that  bark, 
Night  will  have  all  hid. 

But  if  you  let  your  lovers  moan, 
The  fairy  queen  Proserpina 

(and  so  throughout). 


144  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

meant  to  combine  his  loves  and  make  the  last  line  an 
Adonic.  But  it  can  be  scanned  in  a  decent  Anglican 
fashion,  though  he  certainly  meant  mischief  in  "  Come  let 
us  sound,"  l  which  has  a  strange  Caedmonian  suggestion. 

The  Divine  and  Moral  Songs  of  the  Second  Book 
naturally  have  grave  metres — some,  such  as  that  in  the 
opening  "  Author  of  light,  revive  my  dying  sprite," 
approaching  the  majesty  of  the  greater  ode.  There  are 
some  very  beautiful  trochaic  triplets  of  trimeters  ;  and 
some  interesting  quatrains  with  included  rhyme,  but  not 
of  In  Memoriam  length.  Among  "  The  Light  Conceits  " 
there  is  some  very  pretty  common  measure,  though 
Campion  does  not  seem  to  have  cared  much  for  this 
daisy  of  metres,  and  is  indeed,  for  such  a  master,  not 
extraordinarily  happy  in  it.  He  is  more  at  home  in 
such  a  thing  as  "  There  is  none,  oh,  none  but  you," 
with  its  three  trochaics  and  one  iambic.  Campion  seems 
always  to  have  wanted  twists  of  this  kind  to  spur  him 
up  to  his  best  efforts.2 

I  must  regretfully  omit  many  schemes  I  had  noted 
for  comment.  But  in  "  Break  now,  my  heart  " 3  we  come, 
I  think,  to  one  of  those  suggestions  of  pure  music  which 
are  not  happy — a  quintet  composed  of  three  lines  in  pure 

1  Come  let  us  sound  in  melody  the  praises 
Of  the  King's  King,  th'  omnipotent  Creator, 
Author  of  numbers  that  hath  all  the  loveliest  Harmony  framed. 

2  There  is  |  none,  oh,  |  none  but  |  you, 
That  from  |  me  es|trange  your  |  sight, 
Whom  mine  |  eyes  af|fect  to  |  view 
Or  chain  |  ed  ears  |  hear  with  |  delight. 

This  is  not  an  accident ;  every  stanza  is  the  same. 

3  Break  now,  |  my  heart,  |  and  die  !  |  O  no,  |  she  may  |  relent — 
Let  my  despair  prevail  !     O  stay,  hope  is  not  spent. 
Should  she  now  fix  one  smile  on  thee,  where  were  despair  ? 

The  loss  |  is  but  ea  |  sy  which  smiles  |  can  repair ; 

A  stranger  would  please  thee,  if  she  were  as  fair. 

It  is  an  interesting  instance  of  the  difference  between  musical  and  prosodic 
scansion,  that  persons  who  go  by  the  former  would  probably  make  these  last 
two  amphibrachic  instead  of  anapaestic — 

The  loss  is  |  but  easy  |  which  smiles  can  |  repair. 

This,  of  course,  is  possible  prosodically  also,  but  less  natural  and  elegant,  as 
it  seems  to  me,  and  certainly  less  naturally  paused. 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  145 

iambics  and  a  couplet  in    pure  anapaests.     This  violent 
"  trans-&«7>/£- "  is  seldom  good  :  nor  is  it  here. 

It  is,  however,  about  the  only  attempt  which  seems  to 
me  a  failure,  and  we  shall  trace  something  like  it  down 
to  Dryden.  It  would  be  easy  to  produce  dozens  of  things 
which  are  not  failures,  but  exquisite  successes,  from  the 
Third  and  Fourth  Books,  adding  yet  others  from  the 
Songs  of  Morning,  The  Masque,  etc. ;  but  enough  must 
have  been  given  to  show  in  what  a  masterly  fashion 
Campion  plays  over  the  whole  gamut  of  sounds,  the  whole 
palette  of  verse-colours — every  collocation  and  variation 
of  the  cube-integers  that  make  up  the  mosaic  of  prosody. 
And  what  may  be  said  of  him  eminently  may  be  said  of 
the  rest  of  the  song-writers  more  or  less.  Their  results 
are  wonderful  in  themselves.  They  are  more  wonderful 
still  when  we  compare  them  with  the  results,  not  more 
than  twenty  or  thirty  years  earlier,  of  men  like  Turberville 
and  Gascoigne. 

As  in  other  cases,  some  notice  has  been  taken  of  The  Sonnet- 
Sonnets  earlier  than  Elizabeth's  time  and  of  some  that  Ol 
belong  to  it ;  but  this  is  the  place  in  which  we  are  to 
consider  the  great  sonnet-outburst  of  the  ninth  and  still 
more  the  tenth  decade  of  the  sixteenth  century — its 
intrinsic  prosodic  features,  and  the  relation  of  those 
features  to  the  history  and  development  of  English 
prosody  generally.  In  doing  this  I  do  not  think  it 
necessary  to  say  very  much  more  than  was  said  in  the 
last  volume  on  the  general  question  of  the  Petrarchian 
and  the  English  forms,  or  to  pay  as  much  attention  as 
some  have  paid  to  the  varying  constructions  of  the 
English  form  itself.  Whether  this  latter  is  arranged  by 
three  independent  quatrains  and  a  couplet,  or  by  a  greater 
or  smaller  interlacement  of  rhymes  between  the  quatrains 
themselves,  appears  to  me  a  very  minor  matter.  Even 
Spenser's  approximation  of  the  form  to  his  stanza  does 
not  seem  to  me  of  the  first  importance.  The  great  dis- 
tinctions, the  real  differences,  of  the  two  forms  are,  in 
the  first  place,  the  composition  of  the  whole  by  octave 

VOL.  II  L 


146  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

and  sestet  or  by  douzain  and  couplet ;  in  the  second, 
and  still  more,  the  termination  by  tercet  or  by  couplet. 
And  I  have  no  doubt,  that  exquisite  as  have  been  some 
— nay,  many — compositions  in  English  on  the  octave- 
sestet-tercet  plan,  the  model  for  our  language  is  the 
douzain-couplet.  The  national  thirst  for  what  Drayton 
so  quaintly  calls  "  the  Gemell "  comes  in  here  rightly  and 
legitimately ;  and  the  swift  counter-twist  in  form  of  the 
couplet-close  suits  our  headlong  and  masterful  tongue 
better  than  the  drawn-out  dying  of  the  sestet,  and  the 
end  that  is  no  end  of  the  tercet  itself.1 

Community  of  It  seems  to  me  unnecessary  to  endeavour,  thesis- writer 
ts  pheno-  fashion,  to  discover  particular  characteristics  in  Sidney 
and  Watson  and  Barnes  and  Greville,  in  Spenser  and 
Drayton  and  Daniel,  in  Lodge  and  Fletcher  and  Constable 
and  Percy,  in  the  ZepJieria  man  and  Griffin  and  Lynch 
and  Smith  and  Tofte.  They  batten  their  flocks  upon  the 
self-same  hill  to  too  great  an  extent — whether  they  take 
the  grazing  in  French  or  Italian  pastures  really  does  not 
much  matter  ;  and  though,  no  doubt,  individual  poetic 
capacity  and  quality  will  show  here  as  elsewhere,  the 
sonnet  is  so  tyrannous  a  thing  in  itself,  and  the  Petrarch- 
ising  influence,  which  everywhere  accompanies  it,  is  so 
concentrated  and  inevitable,  that  the  general  characteristics 
far  outrange  the  particular.  It  is  chiefly  where,  as  in 
some  cases,  the  songs  and  sonnets  are  inextricably  mixed, 
or  mixed  in  such  a  fashion  that  extrication  would  do 
more  harm  than  good,  that  we  need  "  condescend  upon 
particulars." 

1  The  study  of  this  subject  has,  for  the  general  reader,  been  enormously 
facilitated  recently  by  Mr.  Sidney  Lee's  collection,  and  re-issue  with  additions, 
of  the  sonnet-series  scattered  through  Mr.  Arber's  Garner  (London,  two  vols., 
1904).  As  to  the  two  main  contentions  of  his  Introduction  on  the  originality 
and  the  value  of  the  poems  themselves,  there  might  be,  as  Captain  Jamy  says, 
"some  question  between  us  tway,"  though  I  hope  we  should  conduct  it  more 
amiably  than  Fluellen  and  Macmorris.  But  the  value  of  his  materials 
cannot  be  exaggerated.  For  myself,  my  being  a  subscriber — one  of  thirty, 
most  of  whom,  I  fear,  have  joined  the  majority — to  Dr.  Grosart's  exhumation 
of  Barnes  in  1875  founded  my  study  of  the  minor  Elizabethans;  and  there 
are  few  of  the  sonnet-writers  who  have  not  long  been  denizens  of  my  shelves. 
I  only  wish  Mr  Lee  had  been  able  to  add  the  wretched  Soothern  to  his  flock. 
"  An  imperfect  copy  in  the  B.  M."  is  not  the  state  in  which  I  wish  my 
subjects  to  be. 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  147 

In  all  the  first  group  we  see  that  strange  faculty  of 
prosodic  girding  and  arming  that  had  shown  itself  already 
in  Wyatt  and  Surrey.  Just  as  the  armour  which  Una 
brought  transformed  the  "  tall  clownish  young  man  "  into 
a  very  St.  George,  so  do  the  sonnet-form,  the  sonnet- 
thought,  the  sonnet-phrase  transform  the  rusticity  which 
appears  not  merely  in  the  Turberville  group,  but,  as  has 
been  pointed  out,  in  some  work  of  Sidney's  very  own, 
into  more  or  less  thorough  accomplishment.  People  hurl 
or  pour  contempt  on  the  poor  Zepheria  man,  who  certainly 
did  Pleiadise  rather  excessively,  and  even  in  some  respects 
went  back  to  Chastellain  and  Robertet  rather  than  to 
Ronsard  and  Du  Bellay  for  his  "  aureations."  But  I  am 
not  going  to  give  up  such  things  as — 

O  then,  Desire  !  father  of  Jouissance  !  instance  from 

The  life  of  love,  the  death  of  dastard  fear  !  Zepheria  ; 

The  kindest  nurse  to  true  perseverance 

Mine  heart  inhearted  with  thy  love's  revere ; 
or 

How  have  1  forfeited  thy  kind  regard 
That  thy  disdain  should  thus  engage  thy  brow  ? 
Which  whilome  was  the  scripture  and  the  card 
Whereon  thou  madest  thy  game  and  sealed  thy  vow ; 

which  last  is  not  "  aureate  "  at  all,  by  the  way. 

No  :  this  mobled  queen  is  good  enough  though  she  be  and  of  its 
one  of  the  least  fair  of  the  bevy.      Do  not  let  anybody  g°°' 
talk  about  imitation  or  translation ;   you  cannot  imitate 
or   translate   form   and    phrase   from   one   language   into 
another,  or  if  you  can  "  you  are  the  magician."     Do  not 
let  anybody  say  that  the  subject  and   the  thought  are 
hackneyed.      I  have  nothing  now  to  do  with  the  subject 
and    the   thought.      I    say  that   the   man   who   wrote   in 
English  such  a  line  as — 

That  thy  disdain  should  thus  engage  thy  brow, 

even  if  he  was  translating  verbally  from  French  or  Italian, 
was,  in  his  degree,  what  I  call  a  poet,  and  had  at  any  rate 
in  no  small  measure  what  prosody  in  the  large  sense  can 
supply  to  poetry. 


148  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

And  so  it  is  with  almost  all  of  them  almost  every- 
where ;  though,  of  course,  in  differing  measure  and  degree. 
Sidney  and  Spenser  are  the  greatest ;  and  the  Sonnet 
enables  them  to  write  "  With  how  sad  steps,  O  Moon  " 
and  "  Like  as  the  Culver."  Drayton  is  the  next  greatest ; 
and  one  day  it  would  seem  that  the  Sonnet  chose 
to  take  him  up  from  the  second  or  third  even  to  the 
seventh  heaven  of  poetry,  and  let  him  see  and  say 
such  things  as  no  one  else  but  Shakespeare  ever  saw 
or  said,  in  "  Since  there's  no  help."  The  Sonnet  spied 
Daniel's  one  great  gift  of  meditative  melody  and  said, 
"  By  the  grace  of  me  you  shall  write,  '  Care -charmer 
Sleep.' " 

But  these  are  not  the  most  wonderful  things  that  it 
and  its  little  (or  not  so  little)  sisters,  canzon  and  madrigal 
and  the  rest,  effect  by  their  combination  of  regulative  out- 
line with  rich  atmosphere  of  phrase  and  plethora  of 
passionate  thought.  They  take  a  man  like  Barnabe 
Barnes,  whom  some  people  have  called  a  fool.  They 
catch  him  in  his  singing  season,  and  carry  him  off  with 
them  in  their  company.  He  plays  many  fantastic  tricks, 
shocks  the  grave  and  precise  generally,  occasionally 
behaves  himself  so  as  to  deserve  his  enemy's  nickname 
of  "  Barnzy."  But  all  the  same,  he  gives  us  things  for 
which,  from  other  men  of  perhaps  greater  arts,  under  other 
influences,  we  look  in  vain.  Or  take  the  still  smaller  fry, 
whom  my  friend  Mr.  Lee  calls  "  Poetae  Minimi "  (if  it 
be  so  there  must  be  an  appalling  range  of  minus  quantities 
in  poetry  below  the  minims  themselves),  the  Percies  and 
Lynches,  and  Toftes  and  Smiths.  I  wish  I  had  had  no 
worse  fortune  in  poetry  during  my  critical  life  than  to 
read  them. 

Method  of  The  fact  seems  to  be  that  the  comparatively  strict  and 
operation.  reguiarjy  described  outline  of  the  sonnet-forms  and  other 
similar  things  exactly  suited  the  exuberant  thought  and 
feeling  and  phrase  and  music  of  the  Elizabethans.  It 
was  their  Bottle  of  Salvation  :  it  kept  all  these  luxuriances 
and  ebulliences  from  merely  running  over  and  being  spilt 
upon  the  ground.  There  was  little  danger  —  for  there 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  149 

is  nothing  in  which  bad  rhythm  shows  so  clearly  and 
shockingly  as  in  a  sonnet — of  relapse  into  doggerel ;  there 
was  none  of  the  singsong  of  the  poulter's  measure  and 
the  continued  fourteener ;  none  of  the  monotony  of  the 
couplet ;  hardly  any  (even  the  smallest  space — that  of 
the  quatorzain  itself — being  easy  though  not  loose)  of 
the  cramp  of  the  stanza.  The  poet  was  continually 
"  held  up,"  but  not  too  officiously  or  intrusively ;  and 
he  had  or  took  a  good  deal  of  liberty  with  his 
go-cart. 

The  first  of  these  liberties  that  is  worth  mentioning  is  Licences  and 
perhaps  the  use  of  the  Alexandrine,  which  Sidney1  indulged  vanatlons— 
in,  and  after  him  others.  Their  reason  is  clear  ;  for 
though  it  is  a  mistake  to  say  (as  Dryden,  and  others  who 
might  have  been  better  informed  than  Dryden,  have  said) 
that  the  Alexandrine  was  "  the  commonest  form  up  to 
Shakespeare's  time,"2  it  undoubtedly,  as  we  have  seen  in 
many  cases,  and  have  still  to  see  in  more,  imposed  itself 
to  some  extent,  and  from  curiously  different  sides.  It 
was  at  once  one  of  the  compromises  with  the  longer 
doggerel,  a  part  of  the  popular  "  poulter's  measure,"  and 
an  apparent  though  not  real  representative  of  the  Greek 
and  Latin  trimeter.  But  while  it  is  never  a  success  in 
English  unless  very  sparingly  used,  and  as  an  exception 
and  contrast,  not  as  a  rule  and  staple,  it  is  seldom  less 
of  a  success  than  in  the  sonnet.  Although  this  form  does 
not  call  for,  or  indeed  tolerate,  much  positive  enjambment, 
it  demands  that  the  individual  line  shall  not  absorb  too 

1  In  the  very  first  of  Astrophel  and  Stella — 

Loving  in  truth,  and  fain  in  verse  my  love  to  show, 
where  it  is  most  noteworthy  that  the  famous  final  line — 

"  Fool ! "  said  my  Muse,  "  look  in  thy  heart  and  write," 

discards  the  lumbering  top-hamper  of  the  other  thirteen,  as  if  the  Muse  had 
applied  the  uncomplimentary  epithet  to  them  also.  But,  as  has  been  hinted 
before,  some  good  judges  make  a  fight  for  Sidney's  Alexandrine  as  possessing 
a  quality  of  his  own,  nearer  to  the  French  than  Drayton's.  I  do  not  quite 
see  this,  and  do  not  know  that  I  should  admire  it  if  I  did. 

2  It  is  fair  to  suppose  that  this  mistake  was,  in  not  a  few  cases,  merely 
the    result   of  another — the    inclusion   of    the   fourteener   under   the    term 
"  Alexandrine." 


ISO 


THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


BOOK  V 


in  line- 
number. 


much  attention,  and  shall  be  intimately  connected  in 
thought-run  with  the  rest.  Now  the  Alexandrine  in 
English  distinctly  refuses  liaison,  and,  with  its  all  but 
imperative  middle  break,  excludes  that  variety  of  pause 
which  is  nowhere  more  necessary  than  in  the  sonnet, 
in  line-length ;  Nowhere,  in  fact,  is  that  stapleness  of  the  decasyllabic 
— which  is  as  certain  in  English  as  Dante  found  that  of 
the  corresponding  hendecasyllable  in  Italian,  and  as  is 
that  of  the  Alexandrine  in  French — more  noticeable 
than  here.  And  as  for  excess,  so  for  defect.  As  the 
Alexandrine  is  too  heavy,  so  the  octosyllable  is  too  light 
for  the  sonnet 

In  departing,  on  the  other  hand,  from  the  strict 
quatorzain,  while  the  experimenters  had,  of  course,  plentiful 
Italian  precedent,  they  cannot  be  said  to  have  gone  wrong 
in  the  same  way  as  in  varying  the  line-length.  Watson, 
in  the  Hecatompathia  (though  not  in  the  Tears  of  Fancy}, 
took  an  eighteen-line  form  which  is,  in  fact,  merely  a 
leash  of  sixains,  just  as  the  earliest  English  form  of  all  had 
tended  towards  a  pair  of  rhymes-royal.  There  is  no 
objection  to  this  form  in  itself,  any  more  than  to  the 
quartets  of  quatrains  and  other  things  which  are  tried  by 
others.  Only,  they  are  not  sonnets.  That  there  is  a 
certain  magic  in  numbers,  all  but  the  fools  of  freethought 
admit  or  rather  know  ;  and  this  is  part  of  the  magic  of 
Fourteen.  Yet  the  douzains  and  dizains  of  Laura  (mostly, 
it  would  seem,  written  in  Italy,  and  dated  from  various 
Italian  towns)  are  pretty  forms  enough :  and  sua  divina 
Bellezza  Mistress  E.  Caryl  probably  did  not  think  so 
badly  of  them  as  some  have  done. 

Echo  sonnets,  dialogue  sonnets,  sonnets  like  those  of 
Fidessa,  written  on  a  continuous  epanaphora  (here  "  Most 
true  that "  ;  but  Spenser  himself  goes  far  in  this  direction, 
and  Shakespeare  some  way),  are,  of  course,  of  the  nature 
of  freaks.  But  the  prosodic  beauty  of  it  is,  that  all  these 
freaks  obey  more  or  less  strict  laws  of  modulation  and 
correspondence,  which  oblige  to  the  maintenance  of 
rhythmical  and  metrical  harmony.  And  the  same  is  the 
case  with  the  miscellaneous  forms,  not  seldom  intermixed, 


Other  freaks. 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  151 

which  do  not  even  attempt  to  usurp  the  name  of  Sonnet, 
but  frankly  call  themselves  Madrigals,  Canzons,  or  simply 
Songs. 

The   chief  example  of  this,  after  Sidney  himself  (or  Canzons, 
even,   though   with    much   less    mastery   and    still    lesser  "^"ga^ 

J  —  Barnes. 

critical  power,  in  advance  of  him),  is  the  already-mentioned 
Barnabe  Barnes.  His  Madrigals  (which,  be  it  remembered, 
cannot  be  later  than  I  593,  and  may  be  some  years  earlier) 
actually  anticipate  Spenser,  though,  of  course,  they  are 
practically  far  below  him,  in  the  use  of  carefully  strophic 
compositions  of  varied  line-length.  Barnes's  great  prosodic 
fault  here  —  a  fault  into  which,  no  doubt,  he  was  allured 
by  the  false  analogy  of  his  Italian  models  —  is  his  prodi- 
gality of  double  rhymes,  which,  in  such  measures,  and 
with  no  trisyllabic  feet  preceding  them  in  the  body  of  the 
line,  always  have  an  awkward  effect  in  English.  But 
when  he  gets  free  of  this,  as  in  10  and  1  1,  he  sometimes 
achieves  quite  charming  things  prosodically,  and  he 
deserves  the  high  praise  of  having  quite  evidently  sought 
words  that  will  suit  or  give  his  prosodic  effect.  He  has 
an  echo-sonnet  of  course,  which  is  made  additionally 
freakish  by  his  deficient  sense  of  essentially  ludicrous 
rhyme;  but  his  Madrigals  (16  and  17  are  almost  Odes) 
and  Sestines  represent  his  chief  contribution  to  prosodic 
experiment,  and,  what  is  more,  progress.  His  Elegies  are 
chiefly  different  from  the  Madrigals  in  equality  of  line- 
length,  and  so  less  interesting  to  us  ;  but  his  Canzons 
and  Odes  are  again  very  inspiriting  things.  The  first 
Canzon,  which  is  a  very  elaborate  attempt  in  six  sixteens 
and  a  twenty-line  coda,  despite  all  Barnes's  usual  faults  of 
"  wrenched  accent,"  false  rhyme,  ill-succeeded  rhythm,  and 
fantastic  or  awkward  phrase,  is  a  failure  of  something 
worth  attempting  —  and  some  of  the  Odes,  even  the  Echo 
ones,  are  very  pretty.  As  Dr.  Johnson  remarked  of  his 
cat  Hodge,  we  have  had  better  poets  than  Barnes,  but 
Barnes  shall  not  be  abandoned  to  the  tormentors  —  any 
more  than  Hodge  was.  For  he  saw,  whether  consciously 
or  not  does  not  matter,  what  these  artificial  forms  could 
do  for  English  poetry  ;  and  he  tried  to  do  it  with  them. 


etc- 


152  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

And  it  was  a  thing  right  proper  to  be  done  ;  and  he  did 
not  wholly  fail  to  do  it.1 

Let  me  be  understood  :  I  am  not  saying  that  Barnes 
and  the  author  of  Zepheria  were  great  poets  ;  nor  am  I 
allowing — 

When  to  the  sessions  of  sweet  silent  thought, 
or 

Since  there's  no  help,  come,  let  us  kiss  and  part, 

The  moral  of  to  throw  their  broad  and  star-embroidered  mantles  over 
sonnet  and  ^e  poetastry  and  the  common  form  of  many  things 
similar  in  kind.  What  I  am  endeavouring  to  show  is  the 
enormous  assistance  which  these  artificial  measures,  from 
the  sonnet  itself  downwards  and  onwards,  gave  to  the 
practice  and  establishment  of  sound  and  unerring,  but 
varied  and  harmonious,  English  metre.  In  this  respect 
even  the  less  good  results  were  almost  as  beneficial  as  the 

1  His  faults  (which,  however,  are  in  general  as  easily  corrigible  as  they  are 
obvious),  his  prolixity,  and  his  variety  of  forms  all  make  Barnes  difficult  to 
illustrate ;    but  perhaps  the  following  may  not  so  ill  bear  out  the  remarks 
•          in  the  text : — 

MADRIGAL  u 

Thine  eyes — mine  heaven  ! — which  harbour  lovely  rest, 
And  with  their  beams  all  creatures  cheer, 

Stole  from  mine  eyes  their  clear ; 
And  made  mine  eyes  dim  mirrors  of  unrest. 
And  from  her  lily  Forehead,  smooth  and  plain, 
My  front  his  withered  furrows  took  ; 
And  through  her  grace,  his  grace  forsook. 

From  soft  cheeks,  rosy  red, 
My  cheeks  their  leanness  and  this  pallid  stain. 
The  golden  pen  of  Nature's  book 
(For  her  tongue  that  task  undertook — 
Which  to  the  Graces'  secretary  led, 
And  sweetest  Muses  with  sweet  music  fed) 

Enforced  my  Muse  with  tragic  tones  to  sing. 
But  from  her  heart's  hard  frozen  spring 
Mine  heart  his  tenderness  and  heat  possessed. 

ODE    13 

On  the  plains 

Fairy  trains 
Were  a-treading  measure ; 

Satyrs  played, 

Fairies  stayed, 
At  the  stop's  set  leisure,  etc.  etc. 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  153 

better,  not  so  very  much  less  beneficial  than  the  best. 
The  best,  exercised  and  accomplished  ;  the  worst,  so  long 
as  they  were  not  prosodically  bad,  exercised,  if  they  did 
not  accomplish.  And  this  enormous  variety  of  song  and 
sonnet — more  perhaps  than  anything  else,  because  in 
nothing  else  was  a  certain  discipline  so  constantly  and 
necessarily  present — brought  about  something  like  a 
habit  of  ear,  which  was  the  one  thing  lacking  to  English 
prosody  hitherto. 

But  this  habit  is  no  doubt  pleasantest  to  study  in  poets 
of  major  gift ;  and  we  shall,  according  to  promise,  finish 
the  chapter  with  two  such — Jonson  and  Donne — the  two 
great  teachers  of  the  seventeenth  century  with  Spenser, 
and  in  the  ways  in  which  Spenser  had  least  to  teach. 
One  of  them,  though  his  lyric  work  offers  a  distinct 
contrast  to  his  other,  is  yet  very  much  of  a  piece  through- 
out ;  the  other,  at  least  at  first,  presents  a  hopeless 
discrepancy.  But  Jonson,  who  thought,  with  all  his 
admiration  for  Donne,  that  Donne  deserved  hanging 
prosodically,  is  not  less  worth  our  study  than  the  object 
of  his  admiring  severity. 

Except  that  it  would  have  been  fatal  not  merely  to  jonson's 
scheme  and  method,  but  to  chronological  exactitude,  I lyncs- 
could  have  wished  to  be  able  to  deal  with  Jonson's  Lyrics 
before  touching  either  his  couplets  or  his  blank  verse.  For 
the  account,  in  both  these  cases,  had  to  be  made  with  the 
modern  as  well  as  with  something  of  the  older  sense  of 
"  censorship."  Here  there  is  nothing  that  calls  for  any 
comment  save  that  of  intelligent  admiration,  delight,  and 
praise.  Whether  it  was  that  Ben's  classically  steeped  mind 
found  more  help  in  ancient  lyric  (which  is  certainly  not 
so  far  removed  from  modern  measures  as  couplet  and 
blank  verse  are  from  anything  ancient)  one  cannot  say. 
The  fact  remains  that  some  of  the  daintiest  and  most 
delightful  of  English  lyrics  stand  to  his  credit,  and  that 
in  lyric  he  hardly  ever  gives  us  anything  harsh  or  crude. 
The  most  famous  piece  of  all  is  quite  a  little  demonstra- 
tion of  the  magical  powers  of  poetic  and  especially  prosodic 
art.  It  is  well  known  that  the  substance  of  this  piece  is 


154  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

taken  almost  literally  from  Philostratus.  In  the  Greek, 
or  rather  translated  from  it  as  closely  as  possible,  it  reads 
The  Celia  thus  :  "  Drink  to  me  with  thine  eyes  only.  And  if  thou 
Song-  wilt  bring  it  to  thy  lips,  fill  the  cup  with  kisses  ;  and  so 
give  it  ...  I,  when  I  see  thee  thirst  and  holding  down  the 
cup,  bring  it  not  to  my  lips,  but  think  that  I  am  drinking 
thee  ...  I  sent  thee  late  a  wreath  of  roses,  not  honouring 
thee  (yet  I  do  this  too),  but  bestowing  a  favour  on  the  roses, 
that  they  might  not  fade  ...  If  thou  wilt  do  a  favour  to 
thy  friend,  send  back  the  remains  of  them,  no  longer  merely 
smelling  of  rose,  but  of  thee."  What  this  becomes,  though 
everybody  ought  to  know  it,  nobody  shall  be  deprived  of 
the  delight  of  reading  again.1 

Now  it  is  to  be  observed,  in  the  first  place,  that  the  four 
passages  which  Ben  has  fused  into  this  jewel  of  verse  are 
not  consecutive.  No  two  of  them  are  even  in  the  same  letter ; 
and  the  third  and  fourth  are  separated  pretty  widely  from 
the  first  and  second.  Philostratus  never  thought  of 
putting  them  together  ;  they  were  with  him,  though  very 
pretty,  quite  isolated  conceits.  If  the  perfect  whole  which 
they  now  present  is  the  result  of  plagiarism,  let  us  heartily 
pray  for  the  multiplication  of  plagiarists  and  out-Vida 

1  Drink  to  me  only  with  thine  eyes 

And  I  will  pledge  with  mine ; 
Or  leave  a  kiss  but  in  the  cup 

And  I'll  not  look  for  wine. 
The  thirst  that  from  the  soul  doth  rise 

Doth  ask  a  drink  divine  ; 
But  might  I  of  Jove's  nectar  sup, 

I  would  not  change  for  thine. 
I  sent  thee  late  a  rosy  wreath, 

Not  so  much  honouring  thee, 
As  giving  it  a  hope  that  there 

It  would  not  withered  be. 
But  thou  thereon  did'st  only  breathe, 

And  sent'st  it  back  to  me — 
Since  when  it  grows  and  smells,  I  swear, 

Not  of  itself,  but  thee. 

If  it  were  not  for  "  I  swear  "  (the  objection  to  which  is  not  that  of  the  other 
Johnson  in  another  case)  the  thing  would  be  absolutely  perfect.  Gifford  (see 
his  notes  in  loc.}  is  justly  severe  on  Cumberland  for  remarks  on  the  song. 
These,  he  thinks  (and  very  likely  they  do),  represent  the  ideas  of  Sir  Fretful's 
grandfather  Bentley,  whose  taste  was  as  bad  as  his  scholarship  was  good. 
But  he  is  rather  too  severe  on  Cumberland's  translation,  which  only  goes  a 
little  wrong. 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  155 

Vida  in  the  great  commandment  "  Steal !  "  But  there  is, 
of  course,  very  much  more  in  the  piece  than  an  ingenious 
and  lucky  putting  together  ;  there  is  much  more  even  than 
the  additions,  which  I  have  sometimes  thought  it  might 
not  be  impertinent  to  italicise.  The  triumph,  the  charm, 
is  in  the  way  in  which  bits  of  mere  prose  are  turned  into 
a  magical  unity  of  living  verse.  The  single  trochee  at 
the  beginning,  never  repeated  as  a  foot,  but  thrown  back 
to  by  the  trochaic  words  "  only,"  "  nectar,"  "  rosy,"  etc. ; 
the  subtle  beauty  of  the  four-times-repeated  rhymes,  each 
of  resonant  and  suggestive  quality,  in  the  even  places, 
and  the  longer-distanced  ones  in  the  odd  ;  above  all,  the 
ineffable  and  almost  intolerable  cadence  and  soar  of  the 
whole,  are  things  that  cannot  be  admired,  studied, 
rejoiced  in,  too  much.  Here  perhaps  for  the  first  time 
— for  though  the  piece  appeared  in  1616,  it  may,  as 
some  others  were  certainly,  have  been  written  many 
years  earlier — we  have  that  marvellous  seventeenth- 
century  touch  of  the  common  measure  which  never 
appears  before,  which  was  utterly  lost  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  and  has  not  been  very  often  recovered,  save 
by  accident  or  by  very  slavish  imitation,  even  in  the 
greatest  poetry  of  the  nineteenth.  We  shall  fortu- 
nately come  across  it  often,  and  may  discuss  it  generally 
later. 

The  same  astonishing  felicity  in  diction  and  metre  is 
observable  in  a  large  number  of  Ben's  other  lyrics  ;  and 
considering  the  range  and  power  of  his  influence — personal 
and  of  reputation — on  the  younger  men  of  letters  of  his 
time,  it  is  only  fair  to  give  him  some  credit  for  the 
extraordinary  accomplishment,  in  this  respect,  of  English 
poetry  between  1600  and  1650.  To  follow  this  out 
through  the  lyrical  scraps  in  the  Masques  would  be  a 
pleasure  in  writing,  as  it  has  already  been  in  reading ;  but 
in  that  case  three  times  three  volumes  would  hardly 
suffice  to  carry  out  this  undertaking  equitably  in  regard 
to  all  our  poets.  But  room  must  be  made  at  least  for 
some  of  the  most  beautiful  of  the  separate  poems.  The  The  epitaphs. 
"  honey-drop  "  of  the  trochee  in  his  epitaphs  is  well  known  ; 


156  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

and  it  is  to  me  the  chief  reason  for  assigning  to  him  rather 
than  to  Browne1 — 

Underneath  this  marble  hearse. 

This  is  hardly  more  beautiful  than  the  undoubted 
"  Margaret  Ratcliffe  "  piece,2  and  not  at  all  more  so  than 

Underneath  this  stone  doth  lie, 

which  prevailed  even  upon  Addison  to  shut  his  eyes  to 
the  "  false "  or  at  least  "  mixed "  wit  which  pervades  it, 
and  to  which  some  of  us  think  it  owes  as  much  of  its 
beauty  as  it  does  not  owe  to  the  form.  But  the  most 
exquisite  specimen  of  all,  that  on  Salathiel  Pavy,3  is 
structurally  iambic,  and  only  borrows  the  trochaic  effect 
in  the  hypercatalectic  endings  of  the  alternate  monometers. 
Here,  as  elsewhere,  the  extreme  simplicity  both  of  diction 
and  measure,  in  combination  with  the  most  accomplished 
art,  best  explains  the  inexplicable.  It  may  be  pointed 
out,  too,  that  in  every  instance  but  two,  "  This  little 
story  "  and  "  The  stage's  jewel,"  a  rigid  caesura  is  kept  up 
in  the  even  lines,  short  as  they  are,  and  that  the  excep- 
tions are  more  apparent  than  real.  This  brings  out  the 
dying  fall  of  the  ending.  It  cannot  be  accidental ;  and  I 
do  not  think  that  the  effect  here  assigned  to  it  is  merely 
fanciful. 

Others.        But  Ben's  was  no  single-string  lyre.     There  are  the 
wonderful  octosyllables  of  "  Why   I   write  not  of  Love," 

1  Browne  can  be  honeyed  enough,  but  he  cannot  give  his  drops  the 
outline  that  Ben  can. 

2  Marble,  weep,  for  thou  dost  cover 
A  dead  beauty  underneath  thee, 
Rich  as  nature  could  bequeath  thee  : 
Grant  then  no  rude  hand  remove  her. 

The  In  Memoriam  inclusion,  with  trochaic  form,  may  be  noted. 

3  Weep  with  me,  all  you  who  read 

This  little  story ; 

And  know  for  whom  a  tear  you  shed, 
Death's  self  is  sorry. 

The  fact  that  several  of  the  odd  lines  have  only  seven  syllables  should  not 
mislead.  It  will  be  found  in  every  case,  I  think,  that  the  missing  syllable 
rhythmically  belongs  to  the  first  foot,  not  the  last. 


CHAP,  iv      ELIZABETHAN  LYRIC  AND  SONNET  157 

from  which  Landor,  consciously  or  not,  drew  some  of  his 
best,  and  what  is  sometimes  thought  his  most  characteristic 
music ;  the  tens  and  eights  of  the  Epistle  to  Sir  Robert 
Wroth,1  and  the  still  finer  tens  and  sixes 2  of  the  Epode  ; 
dozens  more  instances  of  trochaic  -  iambic  sevens  ;  the 
more  elaborate  stanza  (reminding  one  of  some  of  the 
measures  popular  in  the  last  days  of  the  Middle  Ages) 
of  the  Ode  to  Sir  William  Sidney;3  "Her  Triumph" 
(noted  above)  in  the  Charts  pieces,  and  most  of  the 
opening  Underwoods.  In  all  these  the  prosodic  note  is 
the  unerring  fashion  in  which  Ben  adjusts  his  diction  and 
cadence  to  the  selected  lengths  of  the  lines.  Many  uneven 
metres,  both  old  and  new,  are  mere  faggots — not  even 
possessing  the  rough  general  symmetry  which  a  well  made 
and  tied  faggot  has  ;  and  this  is  peculiarly  noticeable  in 
the  Pindarics,  of  which  Cowley  was  to  set  the  disastrous 
fashion.  But  Ben  never  treats  his  reader  thus.  The  very 
excellent,  doubtless,  but  either  very  hasty,  or  very  shallow, 
or  very  ignorant  people  who  talk  with  scorn  about 
"  questions  of  metre  and  quantity  "  would  say,  probably, 
that  the  only  difference  between  a  poem  in  tens  and  eights 
and  a  poem  in  tens  and  sixes  must  depend  on  the 
meaning.  Let  them,  if  they  have  eyes  to  see  or  ears  to 
hear,  look  at  the  pair  above  cited  together.  The  fact  is 
that  all  natural  conjunctions  of  metre  (and  the  poet  can 
only  find  out  what  are  natural  and  what  are  not,  by 
trying)  have  a  special  character,  which,  by  the  same 
process,  he  has  to  bring  out.  Some  are  complex  and 

1  How  blest  art  thou  canst  love  the  country,  Wroth, 

Either  by  choice  or  fate,  or  both. 

2  Not  to  know  vice  at  all,  and  keep  true  state, 

Is  Virtue  and  not  Fate. 

3  Now  that  the  hearth  is  crowned  with  smiling  fire, 

And  some  do  drink,  and  some  do  dance, 
Some  ring, 
Some  sing, 

And  all  do  strive  to  advance 
The  gladness  higher ; 
Wherefore  should  I 
Stand  silent  by, 
Who  not  the  least 
Doth  love  the  cause  and  authors  of  the  feast  ? 


158  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

expansive,  some  simple  and  intense  ;  and  it  will  be  his 
own  fault  if  he  does  not  suit  them  to  their  subjects — or 
their  subjects  to  them,  as  the  case  may  be. 

The  in  Exactly  what  made  Ben  hit  on  one  of  the  simpler  and 

jntenser  kind,  which,  after  being  tried  once  or  twice  in  his 
own  time,  was  disused  till,  in  ours,  the  whole  sum  of  its 
virtue  was  extracted,  caught  up,  and  uttered  by  Tennyson, 
it  would  be  difficult  to  say.  Inclusive  instead  of  alternate 
rhyme  might  seem  to  present  itself  obviously  enough  ;  and 
we  have  been  able  to  indicate  it — as  arising  probably  by 
accident  in  some  stanza  arrangements — much  earlier.  But 
the  actual  and  continuous  octosyllabic  quatrain  rhymed 
abba  has  not,  so  far  as  I  know,  been  traced  earlier  than 
Ben  Jonson's  elegy  "  Though  beauty  be  the  mark  of  praise," 
which  probably  suggested  Lord  Herbert's  later  practice. 
The  piece  as  a  whole  is  not  one  of  Jonson's  happiest ;  and 
in  particular  he  has  not  wrought  the  diction  up  to  the 
perfection  of  his  best  lyrics.  There  are  obscurities  of 
meaning  ;  slight  (and  not  quite  so  slight)  harshnesses  of 
sound  ;  inversions  which  do  not  improve  the  flow,  and 
syllables  not  placed  in  their  right  situation,  after  the 
fashion  which  makes  "Drink  to  me  only"  and  the 
Salathiel  Pavy  piece  so  delectable.  But  that  habit  by 
which  the  prosodic  virtue  lies,  like  a  Platonic  statue,  ready 
concealed  in  the  marble,  and  only  wants  the  proper  hand 
to  bring  it  out,  is  revealed  clearly  enough.  Might  not  the 
last  two  lines  at  least  of  the  following,  if  not  the  whole 
stanza,  be  Tennyson's  own  ? — 

Who,  as  an  offering  at  your  shrine, 
Have  sung  this  hymn  and  here  entreat 
One  spark  of  your  diviner  heat 
To  light  upon  a  love  of  mine. 

There  is  something  feminine,  though  nothing 
effeminate,  about  the  stanza  which  perhaps  did  not  appeal 
to  Ben.  But  his  discovery  of  it,  and  his  practice  of 
others  in  the  two  examples  just  noted,  would  have  proved 
him  a  great  master  of  metre  if  he  had  left  no  other  claims. 
And,  as  we  have  shown,  he  has  left  many. 


CHAP,  iv  DONNE  159 

In  the  greatest  of  all  the  great  Deans  of  St  Paul's — an  The  problem 
office  which  has  had  perhaps,  on  the  whole,  during  the  last  of  Donne- 
three  centuries,  a  more  distinguished  series  of  incumbents 
than  any  in  Christendom — we  approach  one  of  the  few 
well-known  prosodic  problems.  Ben  Jonson,  as  he 
had  a  knack  of  doing,  proposed  that  problem  in  the 
Drummond  conversation  by  the  two  exceedingly  Jonsonian 
statements,  that  "  Donne  was  the  first  poet  of  the  world 
for  some  things,"  and  that  "  Donne,  for  not  keeping  of 
accent,  deserved  hanging."  The  first,  with  due  emphasis 
on  its  proviso,  is  pretty  near  the  truth ;  as  for  the  second, 
it  makes  a  very  interesting  pendant  to  that  other,  that 
Spenser  "in  affecting  the  ancients  writ  no  language." 
The  drawback  of  both  these,  as  contrasted  with  the  first, 
is  that  in  them,  as  not  in  it,  a  very  large  proviso  is  not 
expressed — a  proviso  so  large  that  to  put  it  accurately 
and  adequately  in  words  would  take  several  sentences. 
As  for  Spenser,  we  have  dealt  with  him.  As  for  Donne, 
we  must  deal  with  him  now. 

He  has  left  us,  speaking  roughly,  three  classes  of  His  double 
poetry — satires  ;  miscellaneous  poems  chiefly  in  couplet  ; 
and  lyrics.  Now  the  puzzle  of  his  prosody  consists,  not 
merely  in  the  fact  that  the  satires  do  not,  as  Ben  calls  it, 
and  as  some  would  still  call  it,  "  keep  accent,"  though 
that  is  a  most  inadequate  description  of  their  eccentricities. 
It  lies  in  the  fact  that  his  peculiarity  is  very  much 
less  noticeable  in  the  miscellaneous  poems,  and  hardly 
noticeable  at  all  in  the  lyrics. 

That  Donne  takes  the  benefit  of  the  general  law, 
elsewhere  often  stated,  in  regard  to  satire  hardly  needs 
emphasising.  But  that  general  law,  while  it  may  cover 
the  eccentricities  of  Lodge  or  Marston,  Hall  or  Guilpin, 
will  hardly  find  a  lappet  of  its  amplest  gown  that  can 
protect  such  a  passage  as  this  (Sat.  VII.) — 

Sleep,  next  society  and  true  friendship 
-  Man's  best  contentment,  doth  securely  slip 
His  passions,  and  the  world's  troubles  ;  rock  me, 
O  Sleep  !  wearied  from  my  dear  friend's  company, 
In  a  cradle  free  from  dreams  or  thoughts,  those 


160  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

Where  poor  men  lie,  for  Kings  asleep  do  fear. 
Here  Sleep's  house  by  famous  Ariosto, 
By  silver-tongued  Ovid,  and  many  more — 
Perhaps  by  golden-mouthed  Spenser,  too,  pardie,  etc.1 

The  anarchy  Now  it  will    be  observed  by  any  one  who  has  been 

of  the  Satires.  gOO(j  enough  to  fall  in  line  with  the  present  writer,  and  to 
"  read  scanningly,"  that  "  not  keeping  of  accent "  is  a  very 
poor  and  partial  key  or  clue  to  this  labyrinth  of 
cacophonies.  It  will,  though  very  poorly,  do  something 
for  "  friendship "  ;  but  it  will  do  hardly  anything  for 
"  troubles,"  which  a  man  can  scarcely  pronounce 
"  trubulls "  if  he  would.  It  is  still  more  ridiculous  to 
think  that  Donne  intended  any  one  to  accent  "cradle" 
"cradull"  and  "Ariosto"  "a- wry -6 -stow."  There  is 
something  much  more  than  keeping,  or  not  keeping,  of 
accent  here.  Note,  too,  that  line  five  begins  as  if  "  in  a 
era-"  were  to  be  scanned  together  trisyllabically,  and  makes 
a  perfectly  harmonious  run,  till  you  find  that  if  you  do  so 
you  have  a  syllable  short.  And  note  further  that  3,  7,  9, 
not  to  say  the  same  of  others,  are  absolutely  unrhythmical, 
not  merely  unmetrical.  You  cannot,  except  by  the  most 
enormous  make-believe,  get  any  prosodic  music  out  of 
them.  And  yet  the  man  who  wrote  them  certainly  wrote 
such  a  line  as — 

A  bracelet  of  bright  hair  about  the  bone, 

such  a  couplet  as — 

I  must  confess  it  could  not  choose  but  be 
Profane  to  think  thee  anything  but  thee, 

with    hundreds    of    other    lines    and    couplets     equally 
harmonious. 

The  mere  Persian  licence  of  satiric  roughness  will  not, 
I  say,  cover  this  enormous  difference.  Sometimes  I  have 
been  tempted  to  think  that  Donne  and  others  thought 
themselves  entitled  to  scazontics — that  is  to  say,  iambic 
lines  with  spondaic  or  trochaic  endings,  such  as  the  ancient 
satirists  who  used  the  metre  often  preferred.  But  I  am 

1  Works  of  Donne,  ed.  Chambers,  22  vols.,  London,  1896,  ii.  205. 


CHAP,  iv  DONNE  161 

by  no  means  sure  that  a  bolder  explanation,  and  one 
thoroughly  in  harmony  with  the  general  results  of  the 
inquiry  on  which  this  book  is  based,  may  not  be 
applicable — to  wit,  that  Donne,  recognising  the  classic 
practice  of  equivalence  and  substitution,  used  it  in  experi- 
ment more  freely  than  wisely,  as  upon  the  corpus, 
admittedly  vile,  of  satire.1 

The  poems  which  come  between  satire  and  lyric  in  The  "  middle ' 
him,  whether  in  couplet  or  stanza,  are  still  rough  ;  though 
less  so.  The  Elegies,  which  are  nearest  both  in  matter 
and  time  to  the  Satires,  and  the  Verse  Letters,  some  of 
which  are  in  the  same  neighbourhood,  are  the  roughest ; 
the  Divine  Poems,  which  are  the  latest,  are  the  smoothest. 
The  wonderful  Anatomy  of  the  World,  which  appears 
to  represent  the  turning-point,  though  it  has  a  certain 
ruggedness,  resembling  that  of  Chapman  somewhat,  is 
not  exactly  rough.  If,  however,  we  need  any  single  thing 
to  show  that  Donne  was  a  great  experimenter  in  prosody, 
and  that  he  never  took  the  trouble  to  criticise,  polish,  or 
cancel  his  experiment,2  we  have  it  in  that  rather  unlovely 
though  not  unpowerful  poem  the  Progress  of  the  Soul. 
The  immense  success  of  Spenser's  stanza  had  naturally 
set  his  contemporaries  and  successors  on  seeing  what  they 
could  do.  The  result,  as  in  the  Fletchers'  case,  was 
generally  a  conjugation  of  the  untranslatable  French  verb 
estropier — untranslatable  unless  we  use  a  hybrid  para- 
phrase and  say  "  apply  the  strappado."  But  I  do  not 
know  that  an  uglier  deformation  was  ever  reached  than  in 
this  ten-line  stanza 3  of  Donne's,  which  ruins  itself  from 

1  After  the  first  draft  of  the  text  was  written  I  received  from  America  an 
original  and  very  careful  monograph  on  The  Rhetoric  of  John  Donne's 
Verse  by  W.  F.  Melton  (Baltimore,  J.  H.  Furst,  1906).  It  should  be 
studied  by  all  interested  in  the  matter  ;  though  I  am  not  sure  that  Mr. 
Melton's  indication  of  "arsis-thesis  variation" — i.e.  alternate  length  and 
shortness  of  the  same  syllable — is  quite  such  a  passe-partout  as  he  thinks. 

2  This   fact,   I   think,    is   fatal   to    the    theory    that    he    was  deliberately 
engineering  a  "  new  prosody." 

3  The  beauty  of  the  actual  opening  couplet  in  the  following  example  will 
only  emphasise  its  misplacement : — 

Prince  of  the  orchard,  fair  as  dawning  morn, 
Fenced  with  the  law  and  ripe  as  soon  as  born, 
That  apple  grew,  which  this  soul  did  enlive, 

VOL.  II  M 


i62  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

the  outset  by  starting  with  a  couplet,  the  very  worst 
preparation  of  the  ear  for  the  distinctive  rhyming  which 
is  to  follow.  As  no  one  who  glances  at  the  edition  I 
have  used  here  for  citation  will  doubt  my  enthusiasm  for 
Donne  as  a  poet,  I  do  not  fear  to  speak  plainly  on  this 
part  of  his  prosody.  Indeed,  it  is  well  that  he  did  not 
lick  his  early  poems  into  prosodic  shape ;  for  then  we 
should  have  lacked  the  most  instructive  prosodic  figure 
between  Spenser  and  Milton — a  "  first  poet  of  the  world 
in  some  things,"  both  poetically  and  otherwise,  who, 
exploring  further  in  a  half-explored  country,  stumbled  in 
many  waste  places.  There  is,  however,  no  doubt  that 
Donne's  eccentricities  had  not  a  little  to  do  with  the 
severe  syllabic  and  accentual  reaction,  which  Milton 
fortunately  did  not  share,  and  against  which  he  remained 
a  standing  and  impregnable  protest.  No  one  will  suspect 
me  of  prosodic  "  Popery  "  ;  but  even  the  wooden  shoes  of 
the  strict  couplet  were  as  seven-leagued  boots  to  get  us 
away  from  the  possibility  of  such  a  line  as — 

His  passions  and  the  world's  troubles  rock  me ; 
or,  if  anybody  takes  refuge  there  in  "  woruld,"  from — 
Here  Sleep's  house  by  famous  Arios-tow. 

"  What  ?  what  ?  Barclay  come  again  ?  " 

The  utter  and  antinomian  transformation  of  the 
prosody  between  Donne's  other  poems  (specially  his 
satires)  and  his  lyrics  can  hardly  be  exaggerated.  One 
experiences  the  shock  of  it  afresh  every  time  one  reads 
this,  more  than  Browning  of  the  seventeenth  century ; 
and  I  confess  that  if  I  were  to  edit  Donne,  I  should, 
without  much  fear  of  the  charge  of  topsyturviness,  put 
The  lyrics,  his  lyrics  last  of  the  poems  that  are  in  any  way  certain, 

Till  the  then-climbing  serpent,  that  now  creeps 
For  that  offence,  for  which  all  mankind  weeps, 
Took  it,  and  to  her  whom  the  first  man  did  wive — 
Whom  and  her  race  only  forbiddings  drive — 
He  gave  it,  she  to  her  husband  ;  both  did  eat ; 
So  perished  the  eaters  and  the  meat, 
And  we — for  treason  taints  the  blood — thence  die  and  sweat. 


CHAP,  iv  DONNE  163 

in  order  that  this  transformation  might  work  the  right 
way.  Even  here  there  are,  of  course,  a  few  lapses.  In 
the  absence  of  the  slightest  revision  on  the  author's  part 
— in  the  absence  even  of  any  evidence  that  he  so  much 
as  saw  the  copy  from  which  our  prints  and  MSS.  were 
taken — it  was  impossible  that  this  should  not  happen.  But 
these  lapses  are  very  slight,  and  in  hardly  a  single  case 
are  they  of  the  essence  of  the  versification,  as  those  in  the 
Satires  and  elsewhere  are.  Here  also,  Donne  is  an 
experimenter ;  and  there  may  not  be  universal  agreement 
about  the  felicity  of  his  experiments.  For  instance, 
beautiful  as  is  the  song — 

Sweetest  love,  I  do  not  go,1 

even  among  its  author's,  I  am  not  sure  that  some  may 
not  think  the  bold  reversal  of  the  usual  order — giving 
trochaic  cadence  first,  and  iambic  second — a  thing  more 
bold  than  wise.  I  do  not  think  so  myself;  but  I  should 
not  hold  any  one  reasonless  who  did.  Perhaps  the  most 
inexhaustible  delight  is  to  be  found  in  those  pieces  which 
are  actually  decasyllabic,  such  as  "  The  Good-morrow." 2 
The  "  nubbly "  ruggedness  of  the  satire-lines  here  melts 
honey-like  into  even  sweetness.  Nowhere  shall  we  find 
a  happier  combination  than  that  in  "  Go  and  catch  a 
falling  star,3  from  the  rocking  trochees  of  the  sestet  to 

1  Sweetest  love,  I  do  not  go 

For  weariness  of  thee, 
Nor  in  hope  the  world  can  show 

A  fitter  love  for  me  ; 

But  since  that  I 
At  the  last  must  part,  'tis  best 
Thus  to  use  myself  in  jest 

By  feigned  deaths  to  die. 

2  I  wonder,  by  my  troth,  what  thou  and  I 
Did,  till  we  loved  ?  were  we  not  weaned  till  then  ? 
But  suck'd  on  country  pleasures,  childishly  ? 
Or  snor[t]ed  we  in  the  Seven  Sleepers'  den  ? 
'Twas  so  ;  but  this  all  pleasure's  fancies  be  : 
If  ever  any  beauty  I  did  see 
Which  I  deserved,  and  got,  'twas  but  a  dream  of  thee  ! 

;;  Go  and  catch  a  falling  star, 

Get  with  child  a  mandrake  root ; 
Tell  me  where  all  past  years  are, 
Or  who  cleft  the  devil's  foot. 


164  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

the  sudden  spondees  of  the  "  bob  "  and  the  iambic  close. 
It  is  with  the  trochee  that  Donne  does  most  of  his  feats 
here,  and  unless  he  wrote — 

Thou  sent'st  me  late  a  heart  was  crowned,1 

(of  which  I  think  far  higher  than  some  seem  to  do)  I  do 
not  know  that  he  has  any  of  the  greatest  triumph  of 
iambic  "  CM."  But  his  eights,  as  in  "  O  !  do  not  die,  for 
I  shall  hate," 2  are  wonderful  past  all  whooping.  He  has 
a  marvellously  sustained  six-line  stanza  (6,  10,  8,  8,  10,  6 
ababcc\  where,  though  the  rhyme  order  is  the  same  as  in 
the  most  usual  sixain,  the  difference  of  line-lengths  creates 
an  entirely  new  music  ;  lighter  things  like  "  The  Mess- 
age," much  twisted  and  "  bobbed,"  and  that  astounding 
"  Ecstasy,"  also  in  eights  or  long  measure,  where,  per- 
haps, the  boldest  line  with  which  poet  ever  dared  fools — 

And  we  said  nothing  all  the  day, 

occurs,  and  justifies  itself. 

But  one  returns,  somehow,  to  the  pieces  where  most  of 
the   lines  are   decasyllabic,  such   as  "  The   Dream "   and 

Teach  me  to  hear  mermaids  singing, 
Or  to  keep  off  envy's  stinging, 

And  find 

What  wind 
Serves  to  advance  an  honest  mind. 

1  There  are  many  MS.  versions  of  this,  which  is  sometimes  ascribed  to 
Sir  Robert  Ayton  : — 

Thou  sent'st  me  late  a  heart  was  crowned, 

I  took  it  to  be  thine ; 
But  when  I  saw  it  had  a  wound, 

I  knew  that  heart  was  mine. 

A  bounty  of  a  strange  conceit ! 

To  send  mine  own  to  me, 
And  send  it  in  a  worse  estate 

Than  when  it  came  to  thee. 

Ben  or  Donne  for  many  ducats  ! 

2  O  !  do  not  die,  for  I  shall  hate 

All  women  so,  when  thou  art  gone, 
That  thee  I  shall  not  celebrate 
When  I  remember  thou  wast  one. 


CHAP,  iv  •  DONNE  165 

"  Love's  Deity,"  so  odd  is  the  effect  of  contrast  with  the 
others,  as  if  the  poet  were  doing  it  on  purpose,  and  saying 
to  Ben,  "  Oh !  you  think  I  deserve  hanging,  do  you  ? 
Keep  accent  in  this  way,  if  even  you  can  !  "  As  for  the 
famous  "  Funeral,"  it  even  ventures  the  fourteener,  and 
vindicates  its  audacity  in  a  wreath  of  verse  as  "  subtle " 
as  that  which  it  celebrates.  While  if  he  wrote  "  Absence," 
as  I  feel  pretty  certain  that  he  did,  he  has  made  an 
almost  unique  special  mould  for  his  thought.1  We  often 
say  to  ourselves  how  admirably  the  sense  and  sound  suit 
each  other  in  this  or  that  poem.  But  here  I  could  almost 
say  that  no  other  sound  could  possibly  suit  this  sense 
— that  we  should  not  "  enjoy  but  miss  "  it,  if  a  foot  were 
changed. 

But  I  must  recall  the  reader  and  myself  from  enjoy- 
ment— it  was  very  hard  to  leave  off  tapping  this  nectar — 
to  the  sober  prosodic  fact  that  the  author  of  most  of  these 
things  certainly,  of  all  possibly,  was  also  the  author  of 
the  jolting  monstrosities  above  cited.  Many  theories — 
my  own  of  a  rather  irresponsible  experiment,  Mr.  Melton's 
of  "  arsis  -  thesis  variations,"  a  dozen  others — may  be 
brought  in  to  account  for  the  contrast.  One  thing, 
however,  is  not  theory  but  fact,  that  the  contrast  is  there. 
In  other  words,  it  was  possible  for  the  same  man  to 
produce  perfect  harmony  in  one  set  of  metres,  almost 
perfect  cacophony  in  others.  In  yet  other  words,  Spenser's 
work  was  not  quite  done.  And  before  Donne  died,  the 

1  By  Absence  this  good  means  I  gain 
That  I  can  catch  her, 
Where  none  can  watch  her, 
In  some  close  corner  of  my  brain. 
There  I  embrace  and  kiss  her, 
And  so  I  both  enjoy  and  miss  her. 

The  reading  of  this  last  line  is  that  of  the  Poetical  Rhapsody,  and  I  think 
the  most  Donnish. 

And  so  enjoy  her  and  none  miss  her, 
or  "  while  none  miss  her,"  as  some  MSS.  have  it,  is  possible. 

And  so  enjoy  her  and  so  miss  her, 
another  MS.  form,  is  feebler. 


1 66  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

fact  that  it  was  not  quite  done  was  shown,  not  merely  in 
the  older  form  of  the  couplet,  but  in  the  newer  of  blank 
verse.  So  somebody  had  to  do  something  more  ;  and  at 
the  beginning  of  the  next  Book  we  shall  see  how  Milton 
came  and  did  it. 


CHAPTER   V 

PROSODISTS 

« 

A  new  subject  of  study — The  attraction  of  classical  metres — Note 
on  Hawes's  Example  of  Virtue — The  "  craze "  for  them  in 
English — Ascham — The  contempt  of  rhyme — Freaks  of  the 
craze — Drant — Harvey  and  Spenser — Stanyhurst — "  Quantity  " 
— Sidney's  silence — Webbe — Nash — Puttenham — Campion's 
Observations — Daniel's  Defence — The  Mirror  for  Magistrates 
once  more — Lesson  of  its  prosodic  freaks — Of  the  prose  dis- 
cussions— Of  its  later  editions — Gascoigne's  Notes  of  Instruction 
— Note  on  King  James's  Rewlis  andCautelis — Chapman,  Jonson, 
Drayton. 

WE  have  now  for  the  first  time,  according  to  the  scheme  A  new  subject 
of  this  Book  as  originally  laid  down,  to  turn,  at  least  of  study- 
partially,  from  prosody  as  a  matter  of  practice  to  prosody 
as  a  matter  of  theory.1  A  certain  amount  of  the  contents 
of  this  chapter  belongs,  as  was  freely  confessed,  to  the  last 
period  of  the  last  volume,  and  was  slightly  handled  there 
by  anticipation  ;  but  had  it  been  dealt  with  then  in  detail 
it  must  have  been  severed  from  its  natural  complement, 
and  left  in  a  very  unsatisfactory  condition.  Moreover,  it 
would  not  have  been  possible  to  mark,  as  it  was  desired 
to  mark,  the  division  between  the  unconscious  and  the 
conscious  dispensations  of  English  prosody.  Hence- 
forward, though  everything  that  every  poet  does  (vide 
Preface)  will  still  not  be  consciously  done  in  obedience  to 

1  I  may  as  well  at  once  refer,  though  I  shall  have  to  do  so  again  and  again, 
more  specially  than  in  this  chapter,  to  the  excellent  contributions  of  Mr. 
T.  S.  Omond  to  the  history,  bibliography,  and  discussion  of  this  part  of  the 
subject.  The  chief  places  of  his  work  are  A  Stitdy  of  Metre  (London,  1903), 
and  English  Metrists,  two  parts  supplementary  to  each  other  (Tunbridge 
Wells,  1903,  and  London,  1907). 

167 


1 68  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

rule,  or  in  carrying  out  of  principle,  prosodic  inquiry  will 
always,  as  a  matter  of  fact  and  time,  if  not  always  in 
the  same  persons,  accompany  prosodic  accomplishment ; 
and  the  last  chapters  of  each  of  our  Books  will,  it  is 
hoped,  represent  this  concomitance  not  inappropriately. 
But  the  first  of  them  must  begin  with  a  fuller  account  (it 
was  glanced  at  before1)  of  the  curious  measles  or  dis- 
temper which,  dangerously  but  not  by  any  means  without 
beneficial  results,  affected  English  poetry  to  some  extent, 
and  English  prosodic  study  to  a  much  greater,  for  more 
than  half  a  century. 

The  attraction        That  the  phenomenon  itself2  was  a  natural  and  necessary 
of  classical       consequence  of  the  general  drift  of  the  Renaissance,  needs 

metres.  .          -  ,  11-  /•/• 

no  setting  forth  here ;  that  the  disease  (if  we  may  so  call 
it)  attacked  all  Europe,  is  a  simple  historic  fact.  But 
the  morbid  and  dangerous  aspect  of  it  was  particularly 
threatening  in  England  ;  and  the  fact  connects  itself 
directly  with  the  general  history  which  we  have  been 
telling.  In  no  literary  country  of  Europe  (for  in  Germany 
it  was  a  case  of  arrested  development,  not  of  sudden  dis- 
organisation and  apparent  decay)  had  the  machinery  of 
poetry  gone  so  wrong  as  in  England.  The  Italians  were 
still  in  their  greatest  poetical  age,  and  the  Spaniards  were 
approaching  it.  In  France  there  had  been  something  of 
a  falling  off  in  poetic  spirit,  though  poets  like  Charles 
d'Orle"ans  and  Villon  had  still  borne  the  torch  high  ;  and 
formal  perfection  had  been  rather  over-elaborated  and 
mis-elaborated  than  lost.  But  in  England,  as  we  have 
seen,  practical  prosody  had  to  a  great  extent  "  gone 
paralytic "  ;  and  though  it  was  recovering,  the  fruits  of 
recovery  were  still  not  very  great,  and  were  not  to  be  so 
for  another  generation. 

The  persons  to  whom  the  new  critical  nisus,  so  long 
dormant  in   Europe,  was  now  extending  from   Italy,  the 

1  Book  iv.  chapter  ii.   "The  Turn  of  the  Tide  :  Classical  Influence." 

2  It  should  not  be  necessary  to  point  out  at  any  great  length  that  we  are 
dealing  here  only  with  the  strictly  prosodic  influence  of  the  classics.     Their 
influence  in  other  ways  was,  of  course,  enormous  ;   though  it  may  have  been 
exaggerated  or  mistaken  in  some  details,  it  cannot  be  denied  or  belittled  as  a 
whole.      But  it  is  not  for  us. 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  169 

place  of  its  resurrection,  had  before  them  not  merely  this 
paralysis  of  the  prosodic  vernacular  in  all  its  deformity, 
but  also  the  salvage  of  ancient  literature  in  all  its  beauty. 
They  found  Greek  and  Latin  poetry  pervaded  with  an 
ordered  vigour  of  prosodic  arrangement,  such  as  has  never 
been  surpassed.  In  these  new-old  poets  they  found 
nothing  (practically  nothing)  of  that  rhyme  which  was 
omnipresent  in  mediaeval  poetry ;  and  they  found  a 
mathematical  system  of  quantitative  arrangement  which 
apparently  left  nothing  to  desire,  either  in  system 
beforehand  or  in  result  afterwards. 

Small  blame  to  them,  then,  if,  especially  at  a  time  when, 
as  we  have  seen,  the  very  pronunciation  and  accentuation 
of  English  were  unsettled  and  uncertain,  they  fell ;  into  the 
usual  fallacy  of  confounding  coexistence  with  causation, 
and  deciding  that  the  orderly  harmony  of  writers  like 
Virgil  was  due  to  the  presence  of  certain  metres  and  the 
absence  of  rhyme,  that  the  discord  of  writers  like  Hawes  l 

1  I  am  ashamed  to  say  that  I  was  not  aware,  when  I  wrote  the  note  on  p.  Note  on 
235  of  vol.  i.,  that  Mr.  Arber  had  at  last  actually  printed  his  transcript  of  Hawes's 
The  Example  of  Virtue  at  the  end  of  his  Dunbar  Anthology  (Oxford,  1901),  Example  of 
a  place  where  one  may  be  excused  for  not  looking  for  it,  though  it  actually  Virtue. 
includes  one-third  of  the  volume.     Gratitude  to  him  for  making  accessible 
what  had  been  so  long  hidden  in  the  Pepysian  and  Britwell  libraries,  and  for 
filling  in  a  gap  of  our  knowledge,  need  not  be  in  the  least  affected  by  the 
fact  that  the  poem  is  one  of  the  very  dullest  of  fifteenth-century  allegories, 
presenting  nothing  but  a  series  of  commonplaces,  arranged  with  extraordinary 
clumsiness,  and  inferior  to  the  Pastime  of  Pleasure  in  every  conceivable  respect 
— except  that   it  is  much  shorter.     This  inferiority  is  -nowhere   more   con- 
spicuous than  in  our  special  province.     The  Pastime  often  plays  havoc  with 
prosody  ;    the  Example  shows  scarcely  anything   but   an  utter  inability  to 
manage  metre  at  all.     A  very  large  proportion  of  its  more  than  three  hundred 
rhyme-royal  stanzas  conclude  with  frankly  octosyllabic  couplets. 

And  tarry  I  did  there  by  long  space, 
Till  that  I  saw  before  my  face, 

in  stanza  4  of  the  body  of  the  text,  is  followed  by 

All  wildness,  I  will  be  your  guide 
That  ye  to  frailty  shall  not  slide, 

in  the  next,  and  by 

For  in  what  place  I  am  exiled 
They  be  with  sin  full  oft  defiled, 

in  the  seventh.  And  so  constantly.  Occasionally  the  poet  seems  to  be  in  a  state 
of  complete  uncertainty  which  of  his  master  Lydgate's  two  favourite  measures, 
rhyme-royal  and  octosyllabic  couplet,  he  is  writing,  as  here  (stanza  81) — 


170 


THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE 


BOOK  V 


The  ' '  craze 
for  them  in 
English — 
Ascham. 


and  Skelton  was  due  to  the  absence  of  metrical  quantity 
and  the  presence  of  rhyme.  Others  before  them,  and 
abroad,  had  done  or  were  doing  the  same  thing  with  less 
excuse  ;  and  in  so  doing  were  providing  more  excuse  still 
for  the  English  innovators.  That  there  was  no  intentional 
treason  to  their  native  tongue  is,  in  the  case  of  men  like 
Ascham,  certain  and  demonstrable  ;  in  the  case  of  almost 
all,  probable  if  not  proved.  There  seems  to  have  been  in 
England  little  or  nothing  of  the  strange  delusion  which  in 
Italy  made  even  men  so  learned  and  sensible  as  Lilius 
Giraldus  despise  the  vulgar  tongue ;  and  though  there 
was  something  of  that  distrust  of  it  which  survived  as  late 
as  Bacon — though  there  were  Little-faiths  who,  as  he  did, 
thought  that  these  weak  and  infantine  dialects  had  no 
chance  with  the  secular  strength  of  Latin — this  very 
distrust  took  for  the  most  part  the  generous  form  of 
wishing  to  strengthen  the  weakling  by  as  much  borrow- 
ing from  antiquity  as  might  be  possible.  The  immediate 
and  direct  results  of  the  movement  were,  in  all  but  infini- 
tesimal proportion,  almost  unconscionably  absurd,  and  it 
might  have  done  ruinous  harm.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
it  did  next  to  none  ;  and  in  certain  ways  it  did  some  good. 
The  history  of  the  craze  has  received  a  good  deal  of 
attention  in  recent  times  and  is  fairly  well  known,1  though 

And  if  a  man  be  never  so  wise, 

Withouten  me  he  getteth  none  utterance. 
Wherefore  his  wisdom  may  not  suffice 

All  only,  without  mine  allegiance  ; 
For  I  by  right  must  needs  enhance 

A  low-born  man  to  a  high  degree, 

If  that  he  will  be  ruled  by  me. 

Speaking  generally,  the  stanzas  are  merely  bundles  of  seven-rhymed  verses, 
the  lengths  of  which  are  not  so  much  varied  as  taken  at  random,  without  the 
slightest  consideration  what  they  are.  In  fact,  this  long-expected  poem,  the 
latest  that  has  come  under  my  notice,  is  the  extreme  example  of  the  Period 
of  Staggers.  It  is  childish  to  put  the  blame  on  Wynkyn  de  Worde  and  his 
compositors.  They  may  have  shared  the  sin  ;  they  may  very  probably  have 
been  unconscious  of  it ;  they  cannot  have  committed  it  wholly. 

1  A  complete  bibliography  of  the  history  and  criticism  of  Elizabethan 
literature  would  be  needed  to  do  justice  to  the  subject.  Mr.  Gregory  Smith's 
Elizabethan  Critical  Essays  (Oxford,  2  vols.,  1904)  is  the  best  single  source 
for  texts.  For  a  study  of  the  special  matter  (including  some  writers  and 
passages  whom  and  which  I  have  not  thought  it  necessary  to  notice)  see  the 
first  part  of  Mr.  Omond's  English  Metrists,  as  above. 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  171 

not  in  its  earliest  documents.  Curiously  enough  it  seems 
to  have  arisen  at  Cambridge,  and  to  have  chiefly  pre- 
vailed among  Cambridge  men  ;  while  Daniel,  who  finally 
smashed  it  in  one  of  the  most  admirable  small  critical 
tractates  in  all  literature,  was  an  Oxonian.  But  that 
justification  which  we  have  already  allowed  to  it  extends 
to  its  nurses  and  fosterers,  after  a  sort  at  least.  It 
appears  to  have  been  an  offshoot  of  the  literary  and 
linguistic  activity,  especially  in  relation  to  Greek,  which 
Erasmus,  learning  it  from  Oxford,  taught  at  Cambridge 
and  developed  there.  It  has  even  been  thought  by  sober 
and  sensible  judges,  that  Ascham,  from  whom  we  have 
the  earliest  accounts  and  advocacies  of  it,  may  have  had 
rather  more  to  do  with  its  actual  inception  and  codifica- 
tion than  either  the  earlier  Bishop  Thomas  Watson,  to 
whom  he  attributes  the  original  production  of  an  appal- 
lingly bad  specimen  in  the  kind,1  or  the  later  Archdeacon 
Drant,  whom  Spenser  has  established  for  us  as  the  law- 
giver of  this  very  scrubby  Parnassus.  But  Watson's 
verse  is  interesting,  and  I  do  not  myself  quite  sympathise 
with  the  desire  which  some  have  shown  to  dethrone  or 
disbench  or  gibbet  (for  all  these  images  present  them- 
selves in  quite  orderly  turn)  Drant. 

It  is  curious,  if  not  unusual,  that  the  earliest  manifesto  The  contempt 
on  the  subject  shows  at  once  the  weak  sides  of  the  new  ° 
proposal.     Ascham  in    The  Schoolmaster  is  very  positive 
about  the  matter,  and  abuses  rhyme 2  with  all  the  rather 
hollow  swagger    of   Renaissance    scholarship,  which    sits 
clumsily  enough   on    a  good-natured    Englishman.     But 
"  rude  beggarly  rhyming,"  "  barbarous  and  rude  rhyming," 

1  It  may  be  repeated,  though  given  in  vol.  i. — 

All  travellers  do  gladly  report  great  praise  of  Ulysses, 

For  that  he  knew  many  men's  manners  and  saw  many  cities. 

And  truly  these  first  English  hexameters  were  justified  of  most  of  their 
children — the  exceptions,  as  we  shall  see  when  we  come  to  them,  being  no 
exceptions  at  all.  Indeed,  even  Ascham,  though  in  the  place  where  he 
quotes  them  he  celebrates  their  "right  quantity  of  syllables  and  true  order 
of  versifying "  (Schoolmaster,  ed.  Arber,  p.  73),  elsewhere  (pp.  145,  146)  lets 
slip  the  words  "hobble"  and  "stumble"  on  the  subject.  V.  inf. 

2  Ed.  et  loc.  cit. 


172  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

"  foul  wrong  way,"  etc.,  prove  just  nothing  at  all  ;  and 
his  positive  arguments  (not  to  mention  certain  damaging 
admissions)  themselves  prove  the  "  wrong  way."  He 
slips  on  his  own  ground  by  stigmatising  the  metre  of 
Terence  and  Plautus  as  "  very  mean  and  not  to  be 
followed."  He  asserts  that  rhyming  was  first  brought 
into  Italy  by  Goths  and  Huns — of  which,  as  to  the  Goths 
there  is  evidence  the  other  way,  and  as  to  the  Huns  no 
evidence  at  all.  His  appeal  to  Quintilian  is  so  absolutely 
absurd  that  we  almost  suspect  Queen  Elizabeth's  good 
tutor  of  having  a  simpleton  side  to  him.  What  good 
rhyming  poetry — what  rhyme  at  all  except  awkward 
jingles  like  Cicero's — had  Quintilian  before  him  ? 

But  the  admissions  are,  after  all,  the  main  thing. 
"  Indeed,  our  English  tongue,  having  in  use  chiefly  words 
of  one  syllable  which  are  commonly  long,  doth  not  well 
receive  the  nature  of  Carmen  Heroicum>  because  dactylus, 
the  aptest  foot  for  that  verse,  containing  one  long  and 
two  short,  is  seldom  therefore  found  in  English,  and  doth 
rather  stumble  than  stand  in  monosyllabis"  Again,  " Carmen 
Exametrum  doth  rather  trot  and  hobble  than  run  smoothly 
in  our  English  tongue."  After  which  he  finds  fault,  not 
merely  with  Surrey's  blank  verse  in  English,  but  with 
that  of  Gonsalvo  Perez  in  Spanish,  and  with  the  Italians 
generally  for  not  versifying  "  true."  This,  of  course,  simply 
means,  for  versifying  without  quantity — a  charge  met  and 
utterly  refuted  by  the  simple  observation  that  the  quantity 
of  one  language  is  not  necessarily — is  not  even  probably 
— the  quantity  of  another. 

Freaks  of  the  This  atmosphere  of  confusion  and  muddlement  en- 
wraps almost  all  those  who  commit  whoredom  with  this 
enchantress,  except  Stanyhurst  partially,  and  Campion 
in  a  certain  sense  wholly.  The  present  day  has  nothing 
to  reproach  them  with  in  respect  of  confusing  accent  and 
quantity,  and  mistaking  the  relation  between  the  two 
even  when  they  are  not  confused :  but  they  do  both 
with  a  singular  obtuseness.  Almost  from  the  first,  as  we 
see  from  the  correspondence  of  Spenser  and  Harvey  on 
the  subject,  there  were  two  schools  of  "  new  versifiers  " — 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  173 

the  less  thorough-going,  and  the  more.  The  former,  who 
have  always  supplied  the  majority  of  English  hexametrists, 
and  who  have  written  the  only  tolerable  English  hex- 
ameters, accepted  the  ordinary  pronunciation  of  English 
as  far  as  it  was  settled  in  their  day,  and  attempted  to 
get  hexametrical  or  elegiac  rhythm  out  of  this.  The 
others  threw  the  whole  vocalisation  of  the  English  tongue 
overboard,  and  endeavoured  to  introduce  classical  (or 
rather  Latin)  rules  of  quantification  for  individual  syllables, 
so  that,  for  instance,  the  second  syllable  of  "  carpenter " 
was  made  "  long  by  position."  Nearly  all  again  broke 
down  over  the  great  crux  of  the  "  common "  syllable, 
which,  rare  in  Latin,  more  common  in  Greek,  is  the  rule 
rather  than  the  exception  in  English.  And  few  had  the 
method  of  the  half-madman  Stanyhurst,  who  methodically, 
however  madly,  writes  "thee"  for  the  article  when  he 
wants  to  make  it  long,  and  keeps  the  ordinary  spelling 
when  he  wants  it  short. 

The  results  of  all  this  meddling  and  muddling  in 
verse — to  give  it  that  title  by  the  courtesy  of  Irony — are 
admitted  by  almost  everybody  to  be  among  the  most 
absurd  things  in  literature.  The  admission  of  Ascham,  a 
Balaam  reversed,  still  stands  against  them — they  "hobble 
and  stumble "  generally  ;  at  the  best  they  "  trot "  and 
bump.  The  great  original  of  Watson,  which  we  have 
quoted  from  Ascham,  is  a  miserable  thing  enough  ;  but  it 
is  tolerable  beside  the  grotesque  (and  perhaps  in  part  in- 
tentionally burlesque)  doggerel  of  Harvey,  and  the  frantic 
gibberish  of  Stanyhurst.1  Even  in  iambics — as  nearly 
indigenous  as  any  English  foot — and  even  in  the  hands 
of  such  a  poet  as  Spenser,  the  ungainly  shamble  of  this 
truly  "  unhappy  verse  "  curiously  "  witnesses  "  its  writer's 
"  unhappy  state."  And  the  proceeding  never  got  out  of 
its  suggestion  of  marrow-bones  and  cleavers  and  salt-box 
as  accompanying  instruments,  till  Campion  practically 
gave  the  whole  case  away  by  abandoning  classical  metres 
altogether,  and  advocating  unrhymed  lyric  of  a  more  or 
less  pure  English  pattern.  We  must,  however,  as  in 

1  See  the  examples  quoted  in  vol.  i.  p.  319. 


174  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

duty  bound,  go  through  the  follies  of  its  advocates  and 
practitioners  a  little  more  definitely. 

Ascham's  own  remarks  on  what  we  shall  not  imitate 
him  by  calling  his  "  foul  wrong  way "  were,  as  we  have 
seen,  confined  to  generalities,  and  the  examples  which  he 
gives,  probably  or  certainly  of  his  own  making,  in 
Toxophilus^  are  of  no  special  interest,  though  they 
illustrate  his  own  frank  admission  of  the  hobbling  of  the 
spavined  jade,  with  which  he  wished  to  corrupt  our 
English  stud.  But  the  idea  was  eagerly  caught  up  from 
him  and  from  Watson  in  their  own  University  and 

Drant.  College ;  and  a  member  of  the  latter,  Thomas  Drant, 
appears  to  have  drafted  a  complete  set  of  Rules  on  the 
subject.  I  cannot  quite  agree  with  my  friend  Professor 
Gregory  Smith  in  doubting  whether  these  were  ever  com- 
mitted to  writing — that  construction  not  seeming  to  me 
compatible  with  the  remarks  of  Spenser  and  Harvey,  to 
which  we  shall  come  next.  But  it  is  certain  that,  as  yet, 
no  trace  of  them  in  formal  state  has  been  discovered. 
Drant  died  in  I  578,  a  year  or  two  before  this  correspond- 
ence, and  as  there  is  no  allusion  to  him  in  The  Schoolmaster > 
which  was  published  after  Ascham's  death  in  1568,  we 
have  a  clear  decade  in  which  Drant  may  have  devoted 
himself  to  the  subject.  But  we  learn  from  Spenser  that, 
before  the  winter  of  1579-1580,  Sidney  and  Dyer,  and 
the  coterie  they  called  their  Areopagus,  had  taken  up  the 
matter  solemnly,  proclaimed  (happily  without  anybody 
obeying  them)  the  surceasing  of  rhyme,  prescribed  laws 
and  rules  of  quantities  and  the  like.  Propter,  or  at  least 
post  guod,  it  appears  that  Spenser  himself  "  is  more  in  love 
with  versifying "  (which  word  these  sectaries  always  use 
in  their  shibboleth  sense)  than  with  "  rhyming." 

Harvey  and        so  aiso  ft  seems,  was   Harvey  ;  but  not  according  to 

Spenser.  _^  A  .  „. 

the  Drantian  or  Areopagite  way.    Spenser  complains  gently 
that  his  friend  and  Mentor  once  or  twice  "  makes  breach  " 

1  Such  as 

Eight  good  shafts  have  I  shot  sith  I  came,  each  one  with  a  fork-head. 
Tax.,  ed.  Arber,  p.  135. 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  175 

in  Master  Drant's  rules,  sending  him  that  "  unhappy  verse  " 
of  his  own.  Harvey,  of  course,  was  not  going  to  stand 
this ;  and  though  very  complimentary  in  general  to 
Spenser,  hits  some  blots  in  the  trimeters,  and  then  proceeds 
to  scold  at  the  Drantian  code,  which  he  himself  "  neither 
saw  nor  heard  before,"  and  therefore  "  will  neither  praise 
nor  dispraise."  Still  he  speaks  handsomely  of  Drant. 
All  this  is  vague  enough  :  though  that  "  the  rules  "  actually 
existed  is  surely  clear  from  a  passage  in  Spenser's  rejoinder, 
where  he  asks  for  Harvey's  own  rules.  Everybody, 
however,  appears  (not  without  some  reason)  to  have  been 
shy  of  liter  a  scripta  in  the  matter  ;  for  Harvey  in  reply 
thinks  he  had  better  "  consult  with  his  pillow  "  before  he 
gives  them.  But  he  then  says  some  sensible  things — as 
that  before  you  can  get  artificial  prosody  into  good  order, 
you  must  agree  upon  one  and  the  same  orthography, 
which  must  itself  be  conformable  to  "  natural "  prosody, 
that  is,  of  course,  pronunciation.  "  Interim  "  he  "  dare  give 
no  precepts."  But  he  would  gladly  learn  why  in  one 
of  Spenser's  examples,  "  the,"  "  ye,"  "  he "  being  short, 
"  me  "  should  be  long,  etc.  And  he  declines  the  authority 
of  "five  hundred  Master  Drants  "  to  make  carpenter"  longer 
than  God  and  his  English  people  have  made  him,"  whence 
it  would  appear  that  one  of  the  rules  was  strict  "  quantity 
by  position."  On  which,  and  on  things  connected  with  it, 
he  speaks  very  good  sense  indeed. 

The  most  curious  of  all  utterances  on  this  matter  is  stanyhurst. 
Stanyhurst's.1  The  modern  reader  who  knows  anything 
about  him  is  apt,  not  quite  justifiably,  to  regard  this 
respectable  Irish  gentleman  and  scholar  as  merely  a 
lunatic.  And  however  thoroughly  one  may  have  acquainted 
oneself  with  the  circumstances  of  the  case,  it  is  still  very 
difficult  to  realise  how  any  one,  not  a  lunatic,  can  have 
ever  put  to  paper  first,  and  then  committed  to  print,  stuff 
which  looks  like  the  utterances  of  a  schoolboy,  to  whom 
some  benevolent  but  injudicious  uncle  had  given  too 

1  In  the  Dedications  to  Lord  Dunsany  (and  the  Learned  Reader)  of  his 
translation  of  the  ^Lneid  (1582),  reprinted  by  Mr.  Arber  in  No.  10  of  the 
English  Scholar's  Library  (London,  1880).  To  be  found,  like  other  things 
here  quoted,  in  Mr.  Gregory  Smith's  book. 


176  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOKV 

much  champagne,  and  who  should  have  been  simultaneously 
furnished  with  a  glossary  of  the  most  out-of-the-way 
words  in  the  English  language,  and  permission  to  spell 
them  as  he  (and  the  champagne)  pleased.1  But  as 
regards  his  prosody  Stanyhurst  was  perfectly  sober. 
He  knew  that  he  would  be  accused  by  "  the  meaner 
clerks  " 2  of  "  making  what  word  he  chose  short  or  long." 
He  insists  that  every  foot,  every  word,  every  syllable,  yea, 
every  letter  is  to  be  observed.  And  then  he  comes  to 
details.  He  objects  to  the  "  curious  Priscianists "  who 
are  stiffly  tied  to  ordinances  of  the  Latins,  remarking, 
justly  enough,  that  the  Latins  had  tied  their  own  hands 
quite  sufficiently  with  Greek  chains,  so  that  we  need  not 
bind  double  fetters  still  more  tightly  on  ourselves.  Breviter 
in  Latin  is  short ;  briefly  in  English  is  long.  It  is  orator 
in  Latin,  orator  in  English  ;  and  so  forth.  So  far  so 
good  ;  but  from  this  point  he  seems  to  deviate  into  one 
of  the  usual  muddles  between  accent  and  quantity  as  if 
they  were  identical,  instead  of  standing  to  each  other  some- 
times in  the  relation  of  cause  and  effect,  sometimes  not, 
but  never  actually  losing  their  individuality. 

He  seems  to  have  understood — though  he  rather 
refers  to  it  as  granted  than  definitely  states  it — the  rule 
that  in  English  the  accent  constantly  tends  backwards, 
and  (as  far  as  possible)  to  the  first  syllable  of  the  word. 
But  he  applies  this  much  too  rigidly ;  and  makes  his 
mistake  worse  by  his  confusion  of  accent  and  quantity  as 
aforesaid.  "  Honour,"  he  says,  "  in  English  is  short  as 
with  the  Latins,  yet  '  dishonour '  must  be  long  by  the 
former  maxim  ;  [What  former  maxim  ?  We  find  none 
except  an  implication  in  the  passage  about  "  Orator,"  etc.] 
which  is  contrary  to  another  ground  of  the  Latins  whereby 
they  prescribe  that  the  primitive  and  derivative,  the 
simple  and  compound,  be  of  one  quantity.  .  .  ."  "  Mother  " 
may  be  long  (he  spells  it  "  moother  "),  yet  "  grandmother  " 
must  be  short ;  "  buckler "  long,  yet  "  swashbuckler  "  is 

1  If  this  seem  extravagant,  the  person  to  whom  it  so  seems  is  requested  to 
open  any  page  of  the  actual  translation ;  or  even  to  refer  to  the  specimen  in 
the  last  volume. 

2  I  beg  his  pardon,  "  thee  meaner  clarcks. " 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  177 

short.  "  And  albeit  that  word  be  long  by  position,  yet 
doubtless  the  natural  dialect  of  English  will  not  allow  of 
that  rule  in  middle  syllables."  He  would,  however,  very 
shrewdly  and  correctly,  have  the  word  "  and "  made 
common.  He  goes  so  far  as  to  charge  those  with 
ignorance  who  say  "  imperative "  and  "  orthography," 
denying  this  to  be  the  true  "  English  "  pronunciation. 

To  pick  up  the  several  arbitrarinesses  and  contradic- 
tions of  this  would  be  superfluous.  They  are  all  too  usual 
in  English  prosodic  writings ;  and  I  daresay  the  present  book 
is  not  free  from  them.  But  we  may  single  out  the  remark 
upon  "  honour."  It  is  very  difficult  even  to  be  certain 
what  he  means  by  "  dishonour  "  being  long,  if  "  honour  " 
is  short.  It  is  almost  stranger  that  his  very  sensible 
observation  on  "  skyward  " l  did  not  suggest  itself  to  him 
on  "  swashbuckler."  But  on  the  whole,  what  has  been 
said  already  covers  the  situation.  He  cannot  rise  to  the 
conception  of  English  as  of  a  language  in  which  pure 
vowel  sound  has  nothing  exclusively  to  do  with  the 
"quantity" — the  metrical  capacity — of  syllables;2  in  "Quantity. 
which  "  position  "  has  nothing  necessarily  to  do  with  this 
quantity,  though  there  are  cases  in  which  it  cannot  be 
neglected  ;  in  which  accent  can  determine  or  entail,  though 
it  may  not  originate  or  constitute,  quantity ;  and  in  which 
a  very  large  proportion  of  syllables  are  naturally  indifferent 
or  common,  so  that  they  can  receive  the  quantifying 
stamp  from  accent  itself  in  the  general  sense,  from 
particular  stress  or  emphasis,  from  position  in  the  verse, 
and  from  not  a  few  other  things.  His  practice  is  of  little 
use  to  us,  because  his  apparently  insane  lingo — the  result 
partly,  as  he  himself  tells  us,  of  a  desire  to  be  different 
from  his  predecessor  Phaer — can  seldom  be  discarded 
sufficiently  to  enable  us  to  judge  his  versification  fairly. 
His  theory  is,  perhaps,  the  least  irrational  of  all  its  class  ; 
and  the  exposition  of  it  is  particularly  valuable,  because 
it  preserves  and  emphasises  for  us  that  excessive  un- 

1  "They  are  but  compound  words,  that  may  be  with  good  sense  sundered." 

2  In  other  words,  in  which  not  all  long  syllables  are  made  so  by  "  long  " 
vowel-sound. 

VOL.  II  N 


1 78  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

certainty l  of  English  pronunciation  which  lies  at  the  root 
as  well  of  these  crazy  experiments,  as  of  the  acquiescent 
dotage  of  the  fifteenth  century. 

Sidney's  Considering  the  part  assigned  to  Sidney  by  Spenser 
lce'  in  banning  rhyme  and  blessing  verse  by  edict  of  his 
Areopagus  ;  considering  the  numerous  experiments  in  the 
new  kinds  which  the  Arcadia2'  contains, — it  may  well  seem, 
and  has  seemed,  odd  that  there  should  be  so  little 
reference  to  the  matter  in  the  Defence  or  Apology. 
Perhaps  we  may  hope  that  a  slight  practical  taste  of  the 
thing  was  as  sufficient  for  the  author  of  Astropliel  and 
Stella  as  it  was  for  his  friend  the  author  of  The  Faerie 
Queene — that  "  having  been  there  "  he  knew  better  than  to 
"  go  "  again,  finding  it  quite  other  than  a  little  prosodic 
heaven.  At  the  same  time  it  is  necessary  to  point  out 
that  the  controversy  raised  by  Gosson  practically  had 
nothing  to  do  with  mere  prosody.  At  any  rate  the  chief 
document  of  the  earlier  Elizabethan  criticism  for  author- 
ship, genius,  and  interest  of  almost  all  kinds,  yields  us 
practically  nothing.  Neither  does  Lodge  touch  the  point, 
nor  Fraunce,  another  member  of  the  Sidneian  circle  and 
practitioner  of  "  versing,"  who  brought  himself  a  specially 
hard  rap  from  the  impatient  ferule  of  Ben  Jonson.3  It  is, 
however,  otherwise  with  Mr.  William  Webbe,  whose  pretty 
well-known  little  Discourse  leaves  one  doubtful  whether 
to  admire  him  for  his  amiable  and  not  ill -guided 
enthusiasm,  or  to  contemn  him  for  his  extraordinary  lack 
of  scholarship  and  knowledge  generally,  his  hasty  adoption 
of  ill-considered  opinions,  and  his  ridiculous  attempts  in 
the  new  versification  itself. 

Webbe.  Webbe  always  reminds  me  of  the  man  whom  Thackeray 
imagined  as  thanking  his  host  for  that  host's  very  best 
Lafite,  and  expressing  approval  of  it,  but  going  on  to  say, 

1  Let  me  protest,  in  passing,  against  the  headlong  credulity  with  which 
some    good    folk   accept   the  supposition    that   Professor   This  or  Dr.    That 
has  "proved "how,  let  us  say,   Shakespeare  pronounced.     It  is  impossible, 
unless  one  rose  from  the  dead,  to  "  prove  "  this  ;  and  though  on  detached  points 
some  probability  can  be  reached,  it  must  always  be  doubtful. 

2  On  these  v.  sup.  p.  94. 

3  "Abram  Francis  in  his  English  Hexameters  was  a  fool"  (Conv.  with 
Drummond). 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  179 

"  And  now  will  you  give  me  some  of  that  capital 
ordinaire  we  had  ?  "  He  has  enthusiasm  for  "  the  New 
poet "  (Spenser),  but  he  does  not  hesitate  to  extol  the 
bastard  and  heteroclite  doggerel  which  that  new  poet  had 
the  sense  to  drop  ;  and  he  produces  some  most  egregious 
travesties  of  his  own,  in  which  the  pure,  if  not  perfect, 
music  of  the  Shepherd's  Kalendar  is  jangled  and  jarred 
from  rhyme  into  "  verse."  He  is  also — Cambridge  man 
and  private  tutor  though  he  was — grossly  ignorant  of  the 
simplest  and  best -known  facts  of  ancient  literature. 
With  all  this  he  means  so  well,  and  loves  so  much,  that 
one  cannot  be  very  angry  with  him. 

His  Preface  contains  the  now  obligatory  fling  at  "  the 
rude  multitude  of  rustical  rhymers,"  etc.,  the  necessity  of 
driving  "  enormities  "  out  of  English  poetry,  and  the  attain- 
ment of  perfect  versifying  by  judiciously  conditioned 
imitation  of  Greek  and  Latin.  The  actual  "  Discourse  " 
begins  with  one  of  the  also  usual  Renaissance  celebrations 
of  the  venerable  and  divine  origin  of  poetry,  with  plentiful 
citations  from  the  ancients.  Hence  he  passes  to  his  first 
laudation  of  "  our  late  famous  English  poet  who  wrote  the 
Shepherd's  Calendar"  desiderating  much  and  not  unwisely, 
that  vanished  English  Poet *  of  which  "  E.  K."  had  spoken. 
More  generalities  follow,  and  a  very  rickety  historical 
sketch  of  ancient  poetry,  supplemented  by  one — still  more 
staggering — of  English,  which  contains,  among  the  matters 
most  nearly  touching  us,  a  commendation  of  the  verse  of 
Lydgate,  and  the  statement  that  "  Piers  Plowman  "  "  was 
the  first  that  observed  the  quantity  of  our  verse  without  the 
curiosity  of  rhyme."  As  to  this,  the  least  that  can  be 
said  is  that  it  shows  that  Webbe  used  the  word  "  quantity  " 
without  any  precise  idea  whatsoever. 

These  citations  and  (generally)  laudations  in  the  other 
sense  of  poets  and  poetasters  lead  him  up  to  fresh  praise 
of  the  Kalendar  and  its  author,  as  well  as  of  Harvey, 
contrasted  once  more  with  the  "  rabble  of  rhyming,"  to 
which  rabble,  as  it  happens,  Spenser,  so  far  as  he  is  a  poet, 

1  Yet  it  is  probable  that  this  was  merely  a  treatise  of  "versing,"  and  that 
Spenser  wisely  destroyed  it  when  he  found  out  his  mistake. 


i8o  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

belongs,  and  belongs  wholly  in  the  Kalendar  itself.  After 
this  he  casts  back  once  more — for  short  as  the  treatise  is, 
it  is  mostly  commonplace  and  verbiage — to  the  Renaissance 
common  -  form  about  delighting  and  profiting,  "  sage 
advice,"  etc.,  with  the  old  quotations  from  Terence  and  Ovid 
and  Martial ;  cites  very  largely  from  Phaer's  Virgil ;  turns 
to  Eclogue  and  the  Kalendar  yet  again  ;  and  only  when 
he  has  spent  more  than  half  his  space  devotes  himself  to 
a  methodical  discussion  of  rhyme  and  verse. 

It  has  by  this  time  struck  him  that  it  is  rather  in- 
consistent to  praise  Spenser  and  other  "  rhymers  "  to  the 
skies,  and  to  trample  their  prosody  under  his  feet ;  and  he 
speaks  a  little  less  disrespectfully  of  it.  "  I  may  not 
utterly  disallow  it,"  he  says,  "  lest  I  should  seem  to  call 
in  question,"  etc.  He  is  "  content "  (he  had  not  been 
"  content "  at  all)  to  esteem  it  as  a  thing  "  the  perfection 
of  which  is  very  commendable,"  only  he  would  like  it 
"  bettered  and  made  more  artificial."  And  then  he 
proceeds  to  show  how  this  may  be  done,  borrowing  a 
little  dubious  history  from  Ascham.  He  analyses  the 
kinds  of  verse  common  at  the  time,  truly  enough  pro- 
nouncing the  fourteener  the  most  esteemed  of  all  other, 
but  recognising  its  resolution  into  common  measure, 
and  then  more  particularly  dealing  with  the  metres  of 
the  Kalendar. 

Next,  generalising  and  perhaps  copying  Gascoigne 
(v.  inf.}  he  decides  that  "  the  natural  course  of  most 
English  verses  seemeth  to  run  on  the  old  Iambic  stroke," 
and  shows  by  example  how,  if  you  change  the  order,  the 
verse  will  not  do.  This  he  turns  into  an  argument  (as  it 
is,  of  course,  such  as  it  is)  against  rhyme,  as  occasionally 
inducing  awkward  metrical  and  other  inversions.  He 
does  not,  however,  disdain  to  suggest  a  rhyming  dictionary, 
and  once  more  goes  to  his  Kalendar  for  K  words  prettily 
turned  "  and  wound  up  mutually  together.  But  he  at  last 
proceeds  to  "  the  reformed  kind  of  English  verse,"  gives 
a  list  of  feet  by  their  classical  names,  admits  the 
difficulty  of  adjusting  them  to  English,  and  then,  after  a 
very  few  more  directions,  ends  with  abundant  (and  very 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  181 

bad)  examples  of  his  own,  and  general  cautions  on  Poetry 
from  Horace  and  others. 

Not  much  criticism  of  this  need  be  given,  and  we  need  Nash, 
say  less  of  Nash's  well-known  and  as  well-deserved  satire 
on  Stanyhurst,  because  it  does  not  turn  on  any  question 
of  principle,  but  merely  on  that  eccentric  Irishman's  applica- 
tion of  principles.  Indeed,  Nash  speaks  rather  kindly  of 
those  similar  but  less  harsh  experiments  of  Fraunce,  to  which 
Jonson  was  to  be  decidedly,  though  more  briefly  hostile. 

George  Puttenham  (si  George  and  si  Puttenham  y  a) l  Puttenham. 
gave  a  whole  third  of  the  not  inconsiderable  treatise 
attributed  to  him  to  the  subject  of  "  Proportion  in  Poetry," 
by  which  he  means  Prosody  :  and  no  small  proportion  of 
this  proportion  is  allotted  to  the  new  "  versifying."  Indeed, 
he  starts  with  "  feet,"  but  for  some  time  deals  with 
ordinary  metres,  not  fearing  to  include  among  them  those 
things  which  excited  the  ever-increasing  ire  of  neo-classic 
critics — "  mathematical "  forms  in  verse.  But  he  allows 
four  chapters  (xiii.  to  xvi.)  to  "versing."  Yet,  when  we 
come  to  the  details,  we  find  that  odd  shrinking  away 
from  the  propositum  which  begins,  as  we  pointed  out, 
even  in  Ascham,  and  which  is  observable  in  all  except 
methodic  maniacs  like  Stanyhurst — to  whom,  by  the  way, 
Puttenham  refers.  The  upshot  of  his  chapters,  when  we 
come  to  examine  them,  is,  after  all,  notwithstanding  the 
other  contradiction  to  be  noticed,  a  matter  of  feet,  not  of 
metres.  Now,  it  will  certainly  not  be  in  this  book  that 
any  one  will  come  across  a  denial  of  classical  feet  in 
English.  The  question  is,  how  far  it  is  possible  to 
combine  these  integers  into  representative  classical  metres. 
There's  the  rub  ;  and  this  rub  Puttenham  (who  frankly 
tells  us  at  the  very  beginning  that  he  has  small  love  for 
"  versifying  ")  persistently  shirks. 

Still,  he  has  a  great  deal  of  strictly  prosodic  matter, 

1  I  merely  insert  this  because  of  a  certain  kind  of  critic.  It  does  not 
matter  here  one  straw  whether  it  is  Puttenham,  and  if  so  whether  it  is  George 
or  Richard.  But  I  have  never  thought  Mr.  Croft's  arguments  for  the  latter 
satisfactory.  For  these  see  his  ed.  of  Eliot's  Governor  (London,  1883)  ;  for 
Puttenham's  treatise,  Professor  Gregory  Smith's  collection,  or  Mr.  Arber's 
separate  issue  (Birmingham,  1869). 


1 82  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

despite  the  enormous  space  given  to  Figures  of  Speech 
and  to  the  "  rag-bag  "  of  the  subject.  His  Second  Book, 
"  Of  Proportion  Poetical,"  is,  in  fact,  wholly  devoted  to 
prosody.  "  Poesy,"  he  says,  very  properly,  "  is  a  skill 
to  speak  and  write  harmonically,"  and  he  deals  with 
all  the  conditions  indicated  by  the  adverb — "  Staff," 
"  Measure,"  "  Situation,"  etc.  Staff  and  Measure  require 
no  long  comment,  though  he  is  very  copious  on  them  ;  but 
it  is  curious  that  he  prefers  the  sixain — perhaps  the  least 
effective  of  all — to  stanzas  both  longer  and  shorter.  He 
is  also  very  minute  on  "  measures,"  and  insists  on  the 
importance  of  caesura.  He  thinks  (his  argument  on  the 
subject  being  to  me,  at  least,  quite  unintelligible)  that  we 
can  have  no  "  feet,"  and  counts  his  lines  merely  by 
syllables  ;  and  he  would,  like  many  others  to  the 
present  day,  arrange  these  merely  by  cadences,  themselves 
determined  by  accent.  He  is  very  particular  about  exact 
rhyme  ;  and  avails  himself  of  elaborate  diagrams  to  show 
its  arrangement,  and  that  of  line-length.  Also  he  lays 
himself  open  to  the  rather  cheap  ridicule  of  many  genera- 
tions since,  by  admitting  and  approving  "  proportion  in 
figure  " — the  eggs,  lozenges,  etc.,  which  so  did  shock  Mr. 
Addison.  For  myself,  I  never  could  see  that  for  the 
lighter  kind  of  poetry — such  things  as  have  since  been 
called  vers  de  society — there  was  any  greater  harm  in 
butterflies  and  bellows  than  in  the  artificial  French  forms  ; 
though  no  doubt — unlike  these  latter — they  have  a  certain 
impertinence  in  wholly  serious  verse.  On  the  whole, 
Puttenham  is  extremely  interesting  as  showing  that,  at 
last,  definite,  even  severe,  attention  was  being  given  to 
form.  If  he  seems  sometimes  to  pay  too  much  attention 
to  the  caddis  and  too  little  to  the  dragon-fly,  why,  these 
things  will  happen. 

Puttenham's  book  appeared,  though  written  earlier,  in 
1589.  In  the  last  decade  of  the  sixteenth  century  the 
interest  in  "  versing,"  as  far  as  may  be  judged  from  extant 
writing  about  it,  slackened — a  few  sputters  of  the  wearisome 
and  ill-mannered  Harvey -and -Nash  controversy  being 
the  chief  exceptions.  In  this,  Harvey  characteristically 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  183 

took  to  himself  the  title  of  "  inventor  of  the  English 
hexameter,"  a  title  which  long  stuck  to  him,  though  he 
certainly  merited 

Ni  cet  exc&s  d'honneur  ni  cette  indignite, 

whichever  way  we  may  take  it.  But  in  almost  the  earliest 
years  of  the  seventeenth  it  came  to  a  head  again,  and 
was,  in  fact,  finished,  for  the  time,  if  not  for  all  times,  in 
the  remarkable  duel  between  Campion  and  Daniel. 

The  peculiarity — we  cannot  exactly  say  the  singularity,  Campion's 
for  there  is  something  of  a  match  to  it  in  Milton— of Observations- 
Campion's  position  as  a  decrier  of  rhyme  in  theory,  and 
a  most  exquisite  master  of  it  in  practice,  was  not  thoroughly 
obvious  during  the  long  eclipse  of  his  orthodox  lyrical 
work  ;  but  it  was  all  along  known  to  any  one  who  read 
his  generous  and  courteous  antagonist's  reply.  And  it 
cannot  be  too  distinctly  explained  that  his  position,  from 
the  very  first,  is  an  almost  entirely  different  one  from  that 
of  all  the  previous  "  versers  "  and  approvers  of  "  versing  " 
— Watson,  Ascham,  Drant,  Spenser,  Harvey,  Webbe, 
Stanyhurst,  and  the  rest.  The  warning  which  Ascham 
himself  had  uttered  had  been  more  than  justified  by  the 
ludicrous  failure  of  nearly  two  generations  of  hexametrists  ; 
and  there  is  hardly  anything  left  of  the  old  attitude  in 
Campion,  except  his  railing  at  the  "  vulgar  and  unartificial 
custom "  of  rhyming — a  little  awkwardly  addressed  to 
Sackville,  the  author  of  some  of  the  finest  rhyme-royal  in 
the  language.  He  labours  this  point  further  in  his  first 
and  second  chapters,  with  the  usual  hopelessly  illogical 
arguments  from  the  non-practice  of  Greeks  and  Romans. 
But  when  he  leaves  off  flourishes  and  comes  to  business, 
describing  the  six  main  feet,  and  (for  what  reason  is  not 
obvious)  ranking  spondee,  tribrach,  and  anapaest,  even  in 
Greek  and  Latin,  as  "  but  servants  to  dactyl,  trochee, 
and  iamb,"  he  says,  "  Only  the  heroical  verse  that  is 
distinguished  by  the  dactyl  hath  been  oftentimes  attempted 
in  our  English  tongue,  but  with  passing  pitiful  success  ; 
and  no  wonder,  seeing  it  is  an  attempt  altogether  against 
the  nature  of  our  language."  The  English  dactyl  is 


184  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

"  ridiculous  "  ;  it  is  "  unfit  for  use  " — confessions  which,  of 
course,  sweep  the  English  hexameter  away  altogether. 
And  he  would  have  all  English  prosody  based  on  iamb 
and  trochee,  though  he  admits,  in  a  rather  gingerly  and 
reluctant  fashion,  trisyllabic  substitution  in  certain  places 
— tribrachs  or  dactyls,  rarely  anapaests. 

He  next  deals  successively  with  "pure"  and  "licentiate" 
iambics — the  latter  allowing  even  tribrachs — with  dimeter 
or  "  English  march,"  of  course  unrhymed  ;  then  he  proceeds 
to  the  "  English  trochaic "  proper  ;  the  English  elegiac, 
the  English  Sapphic,  and  Anacreontic.1  He  has  thus 
described,  with  others  which  he  adds,  eight  several 
kinds  of  English  numbers,  simple  and  compound,  which 
he  commends  with  an  explosion  at  the  "fatness  of 
rhyme,"  and  then  concludes  with  a  chapter  on  the  quantity 
of  English  syllables.  Here  he  sets  forth,  with  the  curious 
mixture  of  acuteness  and  prejudice  which  characterises 
the  whole  tractate,  the  increasing  abundance  of  common 
syllables  in  Latin,  Greek,  and  English  respectively.  He 
thinks  that  the  true  value  is  to  be  "  measured  chiefly  by 
the  accent "  ;  but  strangely  pronounces  the  second  syllable 
of  "  Trumpington  "  naturally  long.  And  his  special  rules 
are  as  arbitrary,  or  nearly  so,  as  Stanyhurst's.  Perhaps 
it  would  be  impossible  to  construct  a  posteriori,  with  all 
our  advantages,  a  document  more  illustrative  of  the 
prosodic-  condition  of  the  time  than  this.  There  is  the 
surviving  prejudice  against  rhyme — purely  irrational,  but 
explicable  because  of  the  association  of  bad  verse  with  it, 
and  because  of  the  general  and  generous  Renaissance 
admiration  of  the  ancients.  There  is,  further,  the  strongest 
revulsion  from  that  badness  of  verse  itself,  and  the  desire 
to  guard  against  its  recurrence  by  a  thorough  examination 
of  principles  and  a  rather  rigid  formulation  of  practice. 
Perhaps  there  is  something  of  that  affectation  of  singularity 
and  originality  which  is  very  human  and  not  always — if 
it  is  sometimes — disgusting.  There  was  no  need — Campion 
had  himself  shown  it,  and  was  to  show  it  amply — of 
limiting  English  verse  to  eight  or  eighty  or  eight  hundred 
1  For  more  on  all  these,  and  examples  of  them,  see  last  chapter. 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  185 

kinds  ;  and  even  one  or  two  of  his  are  very  good,  while 
all  without  exception  would  be  iniproved  by  rhyme. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  and  to  set  against  all  exaggeration, 
misdirected  ingenuity,  and  positive  mistake,  there  is  the 
renunciation,  once  for  all,  of  the  preposterous  new  doggerel 
— more  preposterous,  if  possible,  and  certainly  more 
perverse,  than  the  worst  of  the  old,  if  not  quite  so 
paralytic — which  men  of  learning,  and  to  some  extent  of 
genius,  had  been  trying  to  foist  into  English  for  the  best 
part  of  half  a  century. 

There  was,  however,  mischief  enough  in  the  piece — 
especially  in  its  irrational,  unhistorical,  and,  in  the  best 
sense,  unscientific  contempt  and  refusal  of  rhyme — to 
require  serious  answer  ;  and  it  could  not  have  found  a 
better  answerer  than  Samuel  Daniel.  A  great  poet  Daniel  Daniel's 
was  not,  but  he  was  a  good  poet  in  his  day  and  at  his  Defence- 
hour  ;  he  understood  the  sweetness  and  the  gravity  of 
English  poetry ;  and,  what  was  of  special  importance 
for  the  special  purpose,  he  was  almost  an  impeccable 
metrist  and  rhythmist,  though  he  had  not  such  a  command 
of  lyrical  music  as  Campion  himself.  Moreover,  he  was 
really  "  a  scholar  and  a  gentleman  " — one  who  knew,  and 
who  at  the  same  time  disdained  to  use  his  knowledge 
with  the  warty  incivility  or  the  extravagant  gesticulation 
which  were  too  common,  and  unfortunately  have  never 
been  too  uncommon.  He  had  a  famous  case  as  well ; 
and  the  result  is  one  of  the  most  agreeable  things  of  its 
kind,  and  one  of  the  most  convincing. 

There  may  seem  to  be  a  certain  oddity1  in  the  opening 
of  his  piece,  wherein  addressing  Lord  Pembroke,  the 
nephew  of  one  of  the  most  formidable  practitioners  of 
"  versing,"  and  in  face  of  the  chain  of  abuse  of  rhyme 
which  we  have  sketched,  he  speaks  of  the  use  of  it  "having 
been  held  unquestionable."  Perhaps,  as  was  suggested 
above,  the  craze  had  really  "  gone  under  "  for  some  years, 
or  the  assumption  of  novelty  may  be  rhetorical.  At  any 
rate,  after  a  proper  compliment  to  his  opponent,  which 

1  This  oddity  is  even  double  ;  for  Campion  had,  as  noted,  chosen  for  his 
dedicatee  a  great  practitioner  of  rhyme  itself. 


186  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

would  have  annoyed  Porthos  and  pleased  Aramis,  he 
takes  up  the  most  victorious  and  impregnable  position  of 
all  by  saying, "  we  could  well  have  allowed  of  his  numbers 
had  he  not  disgraced  our  rhyme."  Indeed,  of  the 
"  numbers "  themselves  he  says  very  little.  But  he 
founds  his  case  at  once  upon  the  rock  by  saying,  "Rhyme 
which  both  Custom  and  Nature  do  the  most  powerfully 
defend — Custom  that  is  before  all  Law,  Nature  that  is 
above  all  Art.  Every  language,"  this  golden  sentence 
proceeds,  "  hath  her  proper  number  or  measure  fitted  to 
use  and  delight."  And  to  this  line  he  keeps  throughout, 
never  allowing  himself  to  be  tempted  out  of  it.  His 
history  and  derivations  may  be  vulnerable  :  his  argument 
is  not.  He  dwells  on  the  "  added  excellency  "  of  rhyme  ; 
on  the  delight  to  the  ear  and  the  aid  to  the  memory  given 
by  its  echo  of  delightful  report ;  on  its  actual  universality. 
"  If  the  Barbarian  use  it,  then  it  shows  that  it  sways  the 
affection  of  the  Barbarian  ;  if  civil  nations  practise  it,  it 
proves  that  it  works  upon  the  hearts  of  civil  nations  ;  if 
all,  then  that  it  hath  a  power  in  nature  on  all."  There  is 
not  such  an  irresistible  instance  of  common  sense  logically 
equipped  as  this  in  all  the  anti-rhymers  from  Ascham  to 
Milton.  "  111  customs,"  it  is  said,  "  ought  to  be  left." 
"  Prove  the  illness,"  he  retorts.  Why  should  we  imitate 
the  Greeks  and  Latins  ?  As  for  rhyme  being  an  im- 
pediment, it  gives  wings.  And  then  he  turns  eloquently 
to  the  general  "  Ancient  and  Modern "  question,  not 
condemning  the  ancients,  but  once  more  asking  why  we 
should  "  yield  our  conquests  captive  to  the  authority  of 
antiquity,"  alleging  "  the  wonderful  architecture  of  the 
state  of  England "  as  a  parallel  —  and  urging  that  we 
shall  "  best  tend  to  perfection  by  going  on  in  the  course 
we  are  in." 

But  Daniel  is  far  from  laying  himself  open  to  the 
reproach  of  confining  himself  to  safe  generalities.  He 
points  out — and  it  is  again  crushing  to  the  whole  system 
of  the  versers — that  "  we  must  here  imitate  the  Greeks 
and  Latins,  and  yet  we  are  here  showed  to  disobey  them," 
taught  "  to  produce  what  they  make  short,  and  make  short 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  187 

what  they  produce."  "  Were  it  not  better  to  hold  to  old 
custom  than  to  be  distracted  with  uncertain  new  Laws  ?  " 
Is  not  the  "  iambic  verse "  that  ancient  one  of  five  feet 
which  hath  ever  been  used  ?  the  "  dimeter "  half  of  this 
verse?  And  so  with  the  rest.  Therefore  in  these  eight 
several  kinds  of  numbers  "  we  have  only  what  was  our  own 
before,  apparelled  in  foreign  titles,"  so  that  had  they  come 
in  their  natural  attire  of  rhyme  we  should  never  have 
suspected  them  as  other.  Then  he  exposes  some  of  those 
crotchety  inharmonies  which  we  noted  above.  And  thus, 
with  some  remarks  on  his  own  practice  and  a  free  allow- 
ance of  blank  verse  in  itself,  he  closes  a  tractate  equally 
admirable  for  matter,  arrangement,  and  (in  every  sense) 
"  manner." 

So  far  as  we  know,  Campion  never  attempted  to 
"  duply " ;  and  he  was  very  well  advised  not  to  do  so  ; 
while  he  went  on  with  rhymed  numbers,  in  which  he  was 
even  better  advised.  And  so  the  whole  thing  vanished 
away  like  Spenser's  Orgoglio,  or  better  still  perhaps  his 
false  Florimel,  when  the  true  beauty  was  set  beside  her. 
Even  in  that  curious  splurt  of  Milton's,  to  which  we  shall 
come  in  its  proper  place,  there  is  no  hint  of  "  versing  "  in 
the  Ascham-Harvey  or  even  the  Campion  sense,  though 
there  is  an  echo  of  the  baseless  abuse  of  rhyme.  A  few 
remarks  may  be  made  in  the  Interchapter  on  the  whole 
thing  in  this  phase  of  it,  though  a  complete  discussion  of 
the  English  hexameter  must  still  be  postponed.  Mean- 
while we  have  to  return.  Most  of  the  Elizabethan 
prosodists  have  been  mentioned,  for  most  concerned 
themselves  with  the  craze.  But  some  did  not ;  and  some 
points  in  those  already  mentioned,  not  affecting  this  craze, 
may  be  handled. 

And  here  we  may,  in  the  first  place,  recur  with 
advantage  to  a  book  which  was  noticed  to  some  extent 
in  the  last  volume,  but  which  the  relegation  of  the 
prosodic  studies  of  the  period  to  this  necessarily  reintro- 
duces.  I  have  long  been  acquainted  with  The  Mirror  for  The  Mirror 
Magistrates  "after  a  sort,"  by  incursions  and  prospecting 
expeditions  in  public  libraries.  But  I  knew  very  well  more. 


i88  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

that  it  would  be  part  of  such  an  inquiry  as  the  present 
to  possess  myself  of  it,  and  read  it  line  by  line.  For  the 
length  and  the  breadth  of  that  grisly  plain  are  strewn 
with  prosodic  instances  ;  and  contain  at  least  one  remark- 
able, but  not  much  noticed,  prosodic  discussion.  It  is 
over  now.  Phaer  and  Ferrers  and  Baldwin,  Higgins  and 
Niccols  and  the  singular  Blennerhassett  (what  relation  to 
Skelton's  girl  friend,  Mistress  Jane?),  who  executed  in  Castle 
Cornet  at  Guernsey1  a  large  loop  or  extension  of  the 
piece,  apparently  at  his  own  instigation,  are  all  familiar 
to  me.  The  further  points  in  this  curious  example  of 
collaboration  or  continuation  which  now  require  notice 
are,  first,  some  of  its  actual  prosodic  characteristics  con- 
sidered from  a  fresh  point  of  view  ;  secondly,  the  prosodic 
discussion  above  referred  to ;  thirdly,  the  evidence  of 
prosodic  progress,  which  its  numerous  editions,  extending 
over  more  than  half  a  century  of  time,  furnish  to  us  by 
comparison.  Let  these  be  taken  in  order. 

Lesson  of  its  The  first  is  here  of  least  importance  ;  but  it  is  im- 
portant,  and  it  leads  up  directly  to  the  second.  As  was 
previously  noted,  the  general  metre  is  rhyme-royal,  varied 
occasionally  with  others  and  varied  in  itself  by  certain 
freaks — not  merely  such  as  Ferrers'  already- mentioned 
extension  of  it  to  regular  Alexandrines,  but  of  a  more 
irresponsible  character.  Most  even  of  the  earlier  writers 
have  escaped  the  utter  chaos  of  Hawes  ;  but  they  allow 
themselves  occasional  Alexandrines.  Once 2  the  septets 
give  place  to  what  looks  like  a  stanza,  but  is  really  six 
lines  of  fourteener  couplet.  Final  stanzas  are  often  pro- 
longed to  octaves,  and  in  one  instance 3  there  is  a 
remarkable  anticipation  (perhaps  a  suggestion  ?)  of  Giles 
Fletcher's  cut-down  Spenserian  with  the  Alexandrine 
ending — a  thing  overlooked,  I  suppose,  by  those  who  will 
not  let  Spenser  be  of  his  own  creation.  In  another  case, 

1  I  wonder  if  he  did  it  in  a  very  pleasant  upper  chamber  of  one  of  the 
towers  which  has  a  glorious  view,  and,  when  I  knew  it,  was  used  sometimes  as 
a  prison   and  sometimes  as  a  card-room  ?     (It  was  in  the  latter  capacity  that 
I  became  acquainted  with  it.) 

2  i.  29,  ed.  Haslewood  (London,  1815),  "King  Albanact,"  St.  27. 

3  i.  151,  last  stanza  of  ' '  King  lago. " 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  189 

but  for  one  decasyllabic  slip,  an  Envoy  of  three  stanzas  is 
all  Alexandrine  in  the  Ferrers  fashion.  In  a  few  cases 
Alexandrines  and  decasyllabics  seem  to  be  "  castered " 
out  as  carelessly  as  by  Hawes  himself.  Even  doggerel 
of  an  anapaestic  type  does  make  its  appearance — of  which 
more  presently.  Once  at  least *  there  is  a  j?>teener  ;  and 
more  than  once  quatrains,  decasyllabic  or  other.  One 
Envoy  provides  a  sort  of  choice  of  octaves  or  septets ; 
while  the  option  is  extended  to  nine  in  another  (though 
with  no  Alexandrine  conclusion),  and  in  a  single  final 
stanza  of  yet  another  to  eleven.  The  "  Complaint  of 
Cadwallader  "  is  in  continuous  Alexandrine  "  blanks,"  with 
a  few  probably  accidental  rhymes.  A  curious  quatrain 
of  three  Alexandrines  and  a  fourteener  appears ;  and 
it  may  come  almost  as  a  shock  on  the  unwary  reader  to 
find  Skelton's  Quia  ecce  nunc  in  pulvere  dormio,  with  its 
older-world  tone  and  air,  in  this  newer  company,  and  to 
discover  that  the  Princes  are  murdered  in  the  Tower  to 
the  broken  rhyme-royal  almost  contemporary  with  the 
event.  But  this  last,  it  is  soon  seen,  was  intentional. 

These  earlier  and  more  interesting  parts  of  the  Mirror  of  the  prose 
have  a  framework  of  prose  discussion  in  which  the  authors  discussions- 
and  their  company  make  remarks  on  the  pieces.  Here 
"  the  matter  was  well  enough  liked  by  some,  but  the 
metre  was  misliked  almost  of  all.  Divers  "  even  "  would 
not  allow  it."2  However,  one  argued  that  as  King  Richard 
"  never  kept  measure  in  any  of  his  doings,"  measure  ought 
not  to  be  expected  in  accounts  of  them.  Nor  does  this 
seem  to  be  merely  a  joke  ;  for  the  speaker  goes  on  to  say 
that  the  writer  "  both  could  and  would  amend  in  many 
places,  save  for  keeping  the  decorum  which  he  purposely 
hath  observed  herein."  And  so  on  another  piece  of  the 
kind,  supposed  to  be  the  work  of  a  blacksmith.  An 
odd  argument:  but  the  important  point  is  that,  in  1563 
certainly,  and  perhaps  even  earlier  still  metre  was  "mis- 

1  The  captains  Euridane  and  Thessalone  companions  in  the  prey  (i.  203). 

2  ii.  394.     The  two  pieces  will  be  found  on  each  side  of  this  prose.     So 
also  the  Cadwallader  blanks  above  referred  to  have  a  prose  comment  noticing 
their  agreement  "  with  the  Roman  verse  called  iambus  "  and  condemning  the 
"gothh  kind  of  rhyming."     But  this  was  later — c.  1578. 


190  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

liked,"  seen  to  be  "  rude,"  and  so  forth,  which  would  have 
been  the  regular  thing  not  so  very  many  years  earlier. 
Of  its  later  These  remarks  are,  in  fact,  of  extreme  value,  and  they 
tions.  take  rank  before  Gascoigne's  Notes,  and  therefore  before 
everything  else  in  the  chain  of  evidence,  showing  how  the 
sense  of  rhythm  consciously  impressed  itself  upon  English- 
men. There  are,  indeed,  no  details  ;  we  could  hardly 
expect  them.  But  we  have  evidently  got  out  of  the  time 
when  the  Lydgatian  licences  seemed  natural  ;  though 
Lydgate's  reputation — ratified  as  it  had  been  by  genera- 
tions— continued  in  a  general  way  a  little  longer.  That 
nearly  perfect  verse  like  Sackville's,  and  very  imperfect 
verse  like  that  of  some  of  the  others,  should  find  them- 
selves side  by  side,  is  a  fact  of  value  in  itself ;  that,  how- 
ever imperfectly,  a  sense  of  the  difference  should  exist 
even  in  persons  who  had  not  by  any  means  broken 
themselves  altogether  to  the  more  excellent  way,  is  some- 
thing very  much  more.  Spenser  is  near,  though  not  come. 
It  is  still  something  more,  if  not  much,  that  Higgins,  who 
represents  the  bridge  of  transition  between  the  earliest 
contributors  to  the  Mirror  and  its  latest,  should  be  aware 
that  people  may  find  fault  with  his  metre.  But  the  book, 
as  a  whole,  contributes  a  more  important  evidence  than 
this  from  a  period  later  still — indeed,  as  late  as  almost 
anything  with  which  we  are  dealing  in  this  particular 
division  of  our  subject.  This  is  to  be  found  in  the  "  buck- 
washing,"  as  Mr.  Carlyle  would  have  said,  of  Niccols. 
This  good  gentleman  is  fully  penetrated  with  the  sense  of 
metrical  regularity ;  he  shows  the  fact  that  he  lives 
not  merely  after  Spenser  and  the  final  rhythmicising  of 
English  poetry,  but  after  Gascoigne  and  the  fortunately 
not  final  attempt  to  tie  down  this  rhythmicising  to  the 
narrowest  limits.  Among  the  hundreds  of  new  variants 
initialled  "  N  "  in  Haslewood,  by  far  the  larger  number  will 
be  found  to  be  Procrustean,  shortenings  of  Alexandrines x 

1  When  Niccols  is  confronted  with  the  "  sixteener  "  above  cited,  he  takes 
his  courage  in  both  hands,  and  does  not  merely  cut  out  a  word  or  two.  It 
appears  in  his  version  as 

Stout  Euridane  and  Thessalone  I  did  assay, 
,an  Alexandrine  being  admissible  in  the  place. 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  191 

to  decasyllabics,  and  other  trimmings  of  the  same  kind. 
A  sort  of  White  Terror  has  begun :  you  are  to  be  nothing 
if  not  syllabically  precise. 

The  remarkable  position  and  the  not  less  remarkable  Gascoigne's 
contents  of  Notes  of  Instruction  have  been,  and  will  be, 
frequently  referred  to.  Indeed,  the  little  book,  curiously 
unpretentious,  is  the  very  spring  and  well-head  of  the 
stream  of  English  prosody  on  the  preceptist  side.  It  has 
been  thought  to  be,  and  perhaps  is,  to  some  extent 
indebted — for  suggestion  rather  than  anything  else — to 
Ronsard's  somewhat  earlier  tract  ;  but  there  is  no 
resemblance  of  principle.  It  is  so  short  and  so  much  to 
the  point,  that  an  abstract  of  it  is  hardly  necessary.  Its 
doctrines  can  be  put  as  succinctly  as  could  well  be  desired. 
They  are,  first,  that  accent  must  be  attended  to  ;  secondly, 
that  metre  must  be  kept — you  must  not  wander  from  one 
measure  to  another ;  thirdly,  that  there  is,  at  the  time, 
hardly  any  foot  in  English  save  a  dissyllabic  one — a 
position  of  the  highest  importance,  which  Gascoigne  states 
unwillingly,  saying  that  we  "  have  had  "  others,  and  that 
they  exist  even  in  Chaucer  ;  fourthly,  that  the  pause  or 
caesura  ought  to  be  in  certain  places,  except  in  rhyme- 
royal,  where  "  it  skills  not  where  it  be."  He  mentions, 
besides  this  rhyme-royal,  "  riding  rhyme  "  and  "  poulter's 
measure "  (the  decasyllabic  couplet,  and  the  alternate 
Alexandrine  and  fourteener),  as  well  as  octosyllabics,  but 
makes  no  reference,  or  only  an  oblique  one,  to  the  new 
"  versifying,"  which,  indeed,  at  his  date  was  little  more 
than  an  academic  amusement.1  There  is  a  most  remark- 
able omission,  in  connection  with  that  fateful  limitation  to 
the  dissyllabic  foot,  of  any  reference  to  such  work  as 
Tusser's,  which  was  being  constantly  reprinted.  Probably 
he  disdained  the  subject  too  much.2 

1  There  are,  of  course,  other  interesting  things  in  Gascoigne,  especially  his 
early  deprecation  of  poetic  "commonplaces" — "cherry  lips,"  etc.  ;  but  they 
are  not  strictly  prosodic.     His  peremptory  adoption  of  "  Heaven  "  ("  Heavn  " 
as  it  was  commonly  written)  as  a  monosyllable,  not  to  be  lengthened  except 
by  "licence,"  is  a  precious  prosodic  point  de  reptre. 

2  Very  great  indebtedness  to  Gascoigne,  and  some  through  him  or  directly  Note  on  King 
to  Ronsard,  has  sometimes  been  ascribed  to  King  James  the  First,  then  only  James's  JRewlis 
the  Sixth,  in  his  Rewlis  and  Cautelis  of  Scots  verse,  1584.     There  is  also  a  and  Cautelis. 


192  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

It  is  an  old  brocard  in  English  history  that  the  Wars 
of  the  Roses  made  English  statesmen,  and  Englishmen 
generally,  fear  nothing  so  much  as  a  conflict  for  succession. 
One  might  almost  say  that  the  prosodic  anarchy  which  was 
contemporary  with  the  "  differing  of  the  red  and  white  " 
exercised  a  similar  influence  upon  English  prosodists. 
From  this  came  Gascoigne's  notion,  and  the  notions  which, 
as  we  have  just  seen,  preceded  Gascoigne  in  practice,  if 
not  in  theory.  From  this  came  Spenser's  shyness  of 
trisyllabic  feet,  and  the  rarity  with  which  the  almost 
infinite  variety  of  Elizabethan  and  Caroline  lyric  permits 
itself  the  galloping  metres.  From  this  came  the  abomin- 
able "  apostrophation "  of  the  seventeenth  century,  and 
its  regularised  but  not  much  improved  form  in  the 

theory  that  it  may  represent  exercises  done  by  James  for  Buchanan.  In  itself 
it  is  rather  a  disappointing  little  book  ;  very  clear  and  precise,  but  jejune,  and 
giving  little  more  than  an  analysis  of  the  actual  practice  in  recent  Scots, 
which,  as  we  have  several  times  observed,  was  itself  much  more  precise  and 
regular  than  that  of  English.  It  has  some  oddities  of  phrase — the  chief  of 
which  is  the  usual,  though  not  invariable,  misuse  of  "foot"  for  "syllable" — an 
ordinary  heroic  being  a  "verse  of  ten  feet,"  etc.  "  Colours  "  too  is  used,  not  in 
the  ordinary  sense,  nor  in  the  technical  one  of  rhetoric,  but  as  equivalent  to 
"metres."  James,  as  we  might  expect,  lays  down  his  laws  in  a  very  Mede- 
and- Persian  fashion  ;  and  scarcely  ever  attempts  a  reason.  He  agrees  with 
his  English  and  French  predecessors — perhaps  authorities — in  representing  the 
iamb  as  practically  the  only  foot :  but  allows  an  easement  in  the  shape  of 
what  he  calls  the  "  Tumbling  "  verse,  which  is  not  so  much  doggerel  as  the 
alliterative  line  of  the  middle  period.  Within  the  example  he  gives  "  bob-and- 
wheel "  trimmings.  He  also  calls  these  ' '  rouncevals "  a  word  of  many 
meanings  and  disputed  origin.  "Tumbling"  itself  has  been  thought  to  be 
a  translation  of  "cadence"  (cf,  his  word*  "  flowing"  for  "rhythm";  but 
see  my  note,  vol.  i.  p.  160,  to  which,  though  exception  has  been  taken 
to  it,  I  adhere).  He  calls  pause  or  caesura  "section,"  again  translating 
literally.  He  will  not  allow  identical  syllables  to  rhyme.  He  specifies 
couplets — oddly  described  as  "rhyme  that  is  not  verse"  ;  a  nine-line  stanza 
decasyllabic  aabaabbab ;  a  bastard  octave  which  he  calls  "  Ballad  royal "  ; 
rhyme-royal  proper,  which  he  calls  "  Troilus  verse"  ;  sonnets;  the  tumbling 
variety;  "common  verse";  an  octosyllabic  sixain  ababcc,  and  "cuttit  and 
brokea  verse,"  of  which  his  example  is  Montgomerie's  Cherry  and  Slae 
stanza,  but  which  he  justly  says  may  be  and  is  "  daily  invented  according  to  the 
poet's  pleasure."  The  little  tractate  is  by  far  the  most  exact  and  precise  prosodic 
handbook  that  exists  in  any  form  of  English  before  Bysshe  ;  and  although  it 
is  not,  like  Bysshe's,  a  sort  of  Arian  Quicumque  vult,  prescribing  all  the  wrong 
things  and  proscribing  most  of  the  right,  it  is  rather  sapless  and  scholastic. 
The  citation  of  the  Cherry  and  Slae  stanza  years  before  the  first  known 
edition  of  that  work  may  be  noteworthy,  especially  in  connection  with  Howell's 
use  of  it  three  years  earlier  still.  See  Professor  Raleigh's  ed.  of  Howell's 
Devises  (Oxford,  1906). 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  193 

eighteenth.  From  this  came  the  grave  disapproval  with 
which  Milton's  Samson,  dealing  as  it  did  with  the  green 
withes  of  syllabic  confinement,  was  received  by  some, 
and  I  suppose  also  the  more  singular  and  surprising  series 
of  fictions  by  which  others  have  more  lately  thought  to 
show  that  the  withes  were  not  broken  after  all. 

Altogether,  this,  or  rather  the  nervous  shrinking  from 
the  other  extreme  which  caused  it,  constituted  the  Second 
Peril  of  English  prosody.  It  had  escaped  the  first,  as  we 
saw,  partly  by  the  uprising  of  alliteration  from  its  hundred 
years'  trance,  and  much  more  by  the  agency  of  the  ballad. 
But  both  these  had  shown  themselves  untrustworthy 
agencies.  It  escaped  the  second  by  the  aid  of  Shakespeare 
and  Milton. 

Some  other  strictly  Elizabethan  critics  say  little  on  Chapman, 
prosody  proper  ;  even  Chapman,  whose  combined  learning 
and  pugnacity  might  lead  us  to  expect  aggressive  rather 
than  defensive  explanation  of  his  choice  of  metre,  says 
little  about  it.1  And  there  is  a  curious  absence  of  prosodic 
remark  in  Jonson's  Discoveries,  which  those  who  lay  the 
utmost  stress  on  his  borrowing  from  the  ancients  might 
interpret  in  their  own  way.  We  know  (v.  sup.)  from  the 
less  authentic  but  (with  the  due  grains  of  salt)  acceptable 
Conversations,  that  he  thought  Fraunce  "  a  fool "  for 
writing  hexameters ;  that  he  thought  Donne  deserved 
hanging  for  not  keeping  accent ;  that  he  did  not  like 
Spenser's  metre  ;  and  that  he  thought  the  couplet,  though 
under  an  ambiguous  description,  best  of  all.2  But  this 
knowledge  comes  to  us  only  through  the  not  exactly 
untrustworthy  but  extremely  incomplete  channel  of 
Drummond's  notes  ;  and  the  full  deliverances,  or  others 
not  reported,  might  very  much  affect  his  actual  serious 

1  His  curious  remark  as  to  the  division  of  some  fourteeners  has  been 
quoted  above,  p.  HI. 

2  ' '  He  had  an  intention  to  perfect  an  Epic  Poem  ...  it  is  all  in  couplets, 
for  he  detesteth  all  other  rhymes.      He  had  written  a  Discourse  of  Poesy  both 
against  Campion  and  Daniel,  especially  this  last,  where  he  proves  couplets  to 
be  the  bravest  sort  of  verses,  especially  when  they  are  broken  like  hexameters, 
and  that  cross-rhymes  and  stanzas   .    .    .   were  all  forced."     Now,   whether 
"broken  like  hexameters"  means  a  strong  caesura,  or  enjambment,  positive 
people  may  positively  decide. 

VOL.  II  O 


194  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

opinion  and  doctrine.  The  last  utterance  of  importance 
on  the  subject  that  seems  fit  to  be  handled  in  this  chapter 
is  the  remarkable  note  of  Drayton  to  the  Barons'  Wars, 
on  his  refashioning  them  from  Mortimeriados,  and  on 
his  altering  the  stanza  from  rhyme-royal  to  octave.  He 
says  (illustrating  the  change  with  interlaced  diagrams 
like  Puttenham's)  that  he  thought  the  double  couplet  at 
the  end  "  softened  the  verse  more  than  the  majesty  of  the 
subject  would  permit,  unless  they  had  been  all  couplets 
or  geminels."  The  "  couplet  in  base  "  of  the  octave  seemed 
to  him  better  ;  while,  thereby  showing  almost  certainly 
that  he  had  Puttenham  before  him,  "  the  quatrain  doth 
never  bring  forth  gemells,"  "  the  quinzain  too  soon,"  while 
the  "  sestin,"  which  Puttenham  had  preferred,  "  detains  not 
the  music  long  enough."  To  which  he  adds  the  highly 
characteristic  conceit  that  the  octave,  like  the  Tuscan 
pillar,  has  a  shaft  of  six  diameters  and  a  base  of  two. 
But  (surprising  and  ominous  conclusion  ! )  "  all  stanzas  are 
tyrants  and  torturers."  The  "  geminel  "  or  "  gemell "  seems 
to  be  his  real  love,  after  all.1 

In  this  deliverance,  brief  as  it  is,  in  the  asserted 
preference  of  Jonson  for  the  couplet  and  dislike  of  the 
stanza,  and  in  other  things,  we  can  see  the  "  Prophecy  of 
Famine"  in  regard  to  metre,  which  is  to  be  gradually 
fulfilled,  until  the  couplet  itself  is  left  the  only  authorised 
prosodic  food.  The  thing  would  be  curious,  if  it  were  not 
so  common.  "  Man  never  is  but  always  to  be  blest,"  and, 
in  the  very  days  when  he  has  got  the  greatest  of  all 
prosodic  triumphs  in  the  Spenserian,  there  comes  from  the 
mouths  of  men  like  Drayton,  who  can  manage  stanza 
only  less  well  than  Spenser  himself,  the  grumbling  at  it, 
and  the  cry  for  something  different 

1  My  friend,  Professor  Elton,  than  whom  certainly  no  one  knows  more 
about  Drayton,  rather  demurs  to  this,  and  insists  on  the  qualification  as  to 
stanzas  (which  I  accordingly  quote),  "  when  they  make  invention  obey  their 
number,"  and  on  Drayton's  practice.  But  this  is,  to  me,  a  precious  illustra- 
tion of  that  singular  historical  character  of  prosody  on  which  I  myself  lay  so 
much  stress.  Drayton  was  a  born  (and  a  pretty  early  born)  Elizabethan, 
and  his  practice  followed  his  birth-date — thank  the  Muses !  But  his  theory 
looks  onward,  and  shows  the  influence  of  the  later  times  into  which  he  for 
some  space  lived.  And  much  the  same  is  the  case  with  Jonson. 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  195 

Let  Gascoigne,  however,  and  Drayton  have  the  credit 
which  they  deserve.  Gascoigne,  though  he  seems  to 
acquiesce — not  quite  happily,  but  rather  supinely — in  a 
disastrous  prosodic  disinheritance  ;  Drayton,  though  he 
seems  to  repine,  not  so  much  after  as  in  the  midst  of  "  the 
cucumbers  and  the  melons  and  the  garlic "  of  prosodic 
abundance, — do  actually  and  in  reality  found  as  poets, 
the  one  the  entire  conscious  prosodic  study  of  English, 
the  other  the  attempt  to  discover  the  poetic  values  and 
qualities  of  metre.  For  which  let  there  be  to  them  all 
due  honour. 


INTERCHAPTER    V 

IT  would  be  difficult  to  find  an  instance  where  the  system 
of  halting  to  collect  results  up  to  the  moment  justifies, 
and  in  fact  imposes  itself,  more  clearly  than  in  the  present. 
The  remark  which  has  been  made  above  as  to  Allot's 
England's  Parnassus  is  worth  recalling  ;  for  that  collection 
appeared  at  about  the  middle,  roughly  speaking,  of  the 
period  covered  by  the  foregoing  Book — the  period  from 
1580  to  1620,  in  round  numbers — though  our  actual 
terminations  are  of  course  jagged  and  tallied,  not  squarely 
cut  off.  When  we  closed  the  last  Book  and  volume 
everything,  with  almost  the  single  exception  of  the  work 
of  Spenser,  in  which  we  deliberately  anticipated,  was 
inchoate.  As  we  halt  now,  everything  in  the  stage,  or 
almost  everything  except  the  aftergrowth  of  Caroline  lyric 
and  the  narrative  blank  verse  of  Milton,  has  reached 
perfection.  That  there  is  no  sign  of  over-ripeness  cannot 
be  said  ;  but  no  reasonable  person  would  expect,  or  even 
wish,  to  be  able  to  say  it. 

The  general  characteristic  of  the  forty  years'  work  is 
that  of  the  most  daring  and  multiform  experiment,  con- 
ducted, however,  for  the  most  part,  with  the  sureness  and 
almost  scientific  certainty  of  success,  of  which  Spenser  set 
the  first  example,  and  was  in  a  way  the  accepted  master. 
It  is  no  contradiction  to  the  words  just  used  that  this 
experiment  works  in  directions  which  Spenser  himself 
never  tried.  The  discipline  and  the  guidance  that  succeed 
in  an  Arctic  expedition  are  not  very  likely  to  be  useless 
in  an  Antarctic. 

That  there  is  something  a  little  uncanny  in  the  run 
of  good  luck  which  attends  these  experiments  may  be 

196 


BOOKV  INTERCHAPTER  V  197 

admitted  readily  enough ;  there  is  always  something 
uncanny  in  great  and  beautiful  matters.  But,  for  a  time, 
it  seems  as  if  things  cannot  go  wrong.  The  dangerous 
and  pernicious  heresy  of  classical  "  versing  "  is  supported 
for  years  by  the  greatest  wits  of  the  day,  and  never  quite 
loses  its  hold  on  some  of  them  ;  but  it  does  no  harm. 
The  mistake  as  to  the  single  foot  to  which  Gascoigne 
testifies,  and  which  will  do  some  harm  later,  for  a  time 
does  little  or  none  ;  and  its  action  is  even  beneficial  as 
stopping  the  return  to  doggerel.  And  meanwhile,  what- 
ever they  think  and  theorise  about,  they  all  "  go  and  do  "  ; 
and  some  mysterious  power  wills  it,  and  brings  it  about, 
that  they  nearly  all  go  and  do  well.  Each  of  the  divisions 
of  prosodic  accomplishment  in  the  time  has  a  double 
blessing :  it  gives  good  individual  results,  and  it  helps  to 
fortify  and  establish  some  general  principle  of  English 
prosody.  Even  the  lolloping  fourteener  of  Surrey  and 
Wyatt  becomes  the  fiery  one  of  Southwell  and  Chapman 
before  it  recognises  its  still  higher  possibilities  in  broken 
form,  and  gives  us  the  miraculous  beauty  of  the  Caroline 
"  common  measure."  The  couplet  gradually  separates 
itself  into  its  two  kinds,  and  for  a  time  manages  to 
combine  a  good  deal  of  the  merits  of  both.  The  various 
stanzas,  in  hierarchy  ascending  to,  and  descending  again 
from,  the  supreme  Spenserian,  recover  all  the  beauty  and 
more  than  the  variety  and  flexibility  of  Chaucer.  And 
in  all,  and  still  more  in  two  other  forms  or  groups  of 
form  to  be  specially  noticed  in  a  moment,  there  is,  for  the 
first  time  since  Chaucer  himself,  and  with  this  exception 
for  the  first  time  at  all,  a  pervading  adequacy  and  mastery 
of  prosodic  principle  and  practice. 

No  more  do  the  fingers  fumble  with  the  fiddle-strings  ; 
no  more  is  there  not  merely  a  chance,  but  something  like 
a  certainty,  of  Pegasus  going  lame  or  snapping  a  sinew 
before  he  has  walked  or  flown  for  a  few  lines.  The 
harmony  produced  may  be  more  or  less  beautiful  ;  more 
or  less  accomplished  ;  more  or  less  rare ;  but  it  is  a 
regular  and  settled  accomplishment — the  absence  of  it, 
not  the  presence,  is  the  exception  and  the  surprise.  But 


198  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK 

what  is  still  the  surprise,  and  must  always  continue  to  be 
so,  as  long  as  prosody  and  poetry  last,  is  the  endless 
variety  of  the  effects  to  which  this  new  acquisition  of  the 
general  system  of  English  verse,  and  this  incomparable 
spirit  of  experiment,  in  combination  lead.  And  it  is  in 
the  two  kinds  just  glanced  at  that  this  surprise  is  most 
constantly  ready  for  us — that  is  to  say,  in  blank  verse 
and  in  lyric  ;  while  in  both  there  are  points,  other  but 
certainly  not  minor,  to  consider. 

That  blank  verse  should  become  a  school  of  freedom 
is  not  astonishing,  more  particularly  as  we  saw  that,  in 
the  beginning,  it  was  a  school  of  something  quite  opposite. 
For  as  soon  as  the  blank  verser  began  to  be  familiar 
enough  with  his  instrument  to  recognise  that  it  was  quite 
independent  of  rhyme — that  he  need  not  even  supply  the 
place  of  that  mentor  by  a  rigid  regularity  of  syllabic 
composition — enfranchisement  in  other  directions  was 
sure  to  follow.  Had  it  been  much  used  for  "  papers  of 
verses  " 1  (Gascoigne,  and  one  or  two  others,  be  it  remem- 
bered, did  so  use  it)  the  punctilio  might  have  held.  But 
practically  restricted  to  the  stage  as  it  was  for  so  long, 
the  mere  scuffling  and  heat  of  word-and-wit-combat  were 
sure  to  encourage — nay,  to  force — the  discarding  of  un- 
necessary and  troublesome  uniformity.  Once  more,  the 
Fortune  of  England  thought  of  what  was  necessary,  and 
supplied  Shakespeare  to  carry  out  the  liberation  in  this 
direction,  just  as  she  had  supplied  Spenser  to  carry  out 
the  regimenting  and  drilling  in  the  other. 

But  even  Fortune  cannot  conquer  Nature  ;  and  there 
was  a  peril  in  this  path  from  which  the  other  was  com- 
paratively free.  Everybody  is  the  better  for  discipline : 
everybody  is  not  competent  to  manage  liberty.  In  fact, 
if  (which  is  luckily  not  yet  the  case)  every  man  wrote 
poetry,  I  am  not  sure  that  the  strict  preceptists  would 
not  have  a  great  deal  to  say  for  themselves.  This,  how- 
ever, is  speculation.  It  is  mere  history  to  say  that,  even 

1  "These  numbers  [blanks]  therefore  are  fittest  for  a  play;  the  others 
for  a  paper  of  verses  or  a  poem  :  blank  verse  being  as  much  below  them,  etc." 
Crites  in  Dryden's  Essay  of  Dramatic  Poesy,  ed.  Ker,  i.  91. 


v  INTERCHAPTER  V  199 

before  our  present  period  closed,  the  dangers  of  a  go-as- 
you-please  blank  verse  began  to  be  apparent.  But  it  had 
not,  by  this  time,  so  much  incurred  them  as  shown  the 
possibility  of  them.  And,  on  the  other  hand,  it  had,  in 
the  legitimate  carrying  out  of  the  great  base-principles  of 
English  prosody — foot -division  with  substitution,  pause- 
arrangement  with  licence  to  shift,  and  permission  of 
extrametrical  syllable  at  the  end  only — enriched  English 
with  such  a  measure  as  no  other  language  then  possessed, 
and  as,  in  perfection,  no  other  language  has  ever  possessed. 
This  measure  is  absolutely  rhythmical  and  metrical  — 
absolutely  distinguished  from  prose,  and  yet  uniting  the 
virtues  of  verse  and  the  shiftfulness  of  prose  as  nothing 
else  ever  has  done,  as  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that  any- 
thing else  ever  will  do.  For,  though  there  is  no  limit  to 
the  powers  of  Nature  in  one  sense,  there  appears  to  be 
in  her  a  certain  generosity  which  prevents  her  depriving  a 
perfect  creation  of  its  differentia,  when  this  is  once  dis- 
played. We  have  seen  as  great  metres,  for  instance,  as 
the  Homeric  or  the  Lucretian  hexameter,  but  nothing  has 
ever  had  the  same  merit ;  and  so  on. 

The  desire  for  variety  found  almost  equal — some 
would  say  greater — satisfaction  in  the  innumerable  lyrical 
forms  of  the  time,  but  the  fortunate  necessity  of  corre- 
spondence l  precluded,  in  the  case  of  writers  with  any  ear  at 
all  (and  ear  at  this  time  was  almost  satyrically  acute  and 
universal),  any  lapse  into  disorder.  It  is  probably  a  sense 
— and  certainly  a  result — of  this  safeguard,  combined 
with  the  unconquerable  experimentality  of  the  time,  that 
accounts  for  the  innumerable  and  almost  unclassifiable 
multitude  of  lyric  forms  that  meet  us.  We  saw  in  the 
last  volume  that  Hawes,  who  cannot  keep  himself  straight 
even  in  a  single  rhyme-royal  stanza  because  of  his  neglect 

1  A  note  on  this  word  may  not  be  superfluous.  Correspondence,  in  the 
line  or  between  the  lines,  is  the  note  of  all  metre  ;  but  in  variety,  and  in  call 
upon  the  attention,  it  is  especially  the  note  of  lyric.  And  while,  when  you 
have  written  an  undoubtedly  musical  line,  you  have  got  to  make  the  other  or 
the  others  musical  to  suit  it,  even  a  dubiously  musical  one  will  acquire  a 
certain  harmony  from  the  fact  of  there  being  a  pair  to  it.  But  this  is 
metaprosodic. 


200  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK 

of  line  composition,  is  regular  enough  in  the  not  particularly 
beautiful  but  definitely  lyrical  forms  of  the  Conversion 
of  Swearers.  And  we  saw  that  the  "  intermediates  "  Googe, 
Gascoigne,  Turberville,  etc.,  though  uninspiring,  were  safe 
enough  here.  By  our  present  time  we  have  the  safety 
with  inspiration  ;  and  the  result  is  not  merely  the  actual 
beauty  of  the  songs  in  drama,  romance,  or  mere  music- 
book,  but  the  promise  and  certainty  of  more  to  come,  not 
shadowed  by  any  of  the  dubieties  of  blank  verse.  The 
inspiration  may  fail — will  fail,  though  not  entirely  for 
another  couple  of  generations.  But  the  forms  are  secure, 
and  will  wait  for  it  to  return. 

One  special  point,  of  the  first  importance  in  prosodic 
history,  must  have  its  paragraph :  and  this  concerns  the 
fortune  of  trisyllabic  feet  and  triple-time  measures  during 
this  period.  The  central  preceptist  fact  is,  of  course, 
Gascoigne's  constantly  to  be  quoted  dictum  :  and  it  can 
summon  round,  and  in  support  of  it,  numerous  or 
innumerable  instances  of  elision  or  apostrophation  in 
accordance  with  the  idea.  On  the  other  hand,  we  have — 
earlier  than  Gascoigne,  and,  if  not  recognised  as  poetry, 
constantly  printed  as  verse  throughout  the  half  century 
— Tusser's  frank,  abundant,  and  perfectly  regular  practice 
in  anapaestic  metre ;  a  persistent  if  not  very  copious 
dropping  into  triple  time  on  the  part  of  the  song-writers 
with  Campion  at  their  head  ;  the  more  and  more  constant 
trisyllabising  of  blank  verse ;  and  the  occurrence  in 
other  forms  of  collocations  which,  though  they  may  be 
susceptible  of  crushing  or  cramming  into  sham  dissyllables 
to  suit  theory,  are  more  naturally  and  very  much  more 
harmoniously  trisyllables.  Here  the  aid  of  music  may 
be  cordially  recognised  ;  for  something  of  the  kind  was 
of  the  greatest  importance  to  serve  as  a  rallying -point 
against  the  dogmatic  delusion  chronicled  in  the  Notes 
and  Instructions.  But  on  the  whole,  though  there  has 
now  and  then  been  a  tendency  to  banish  triple  time  too 
absolutely  from  this  period,  we  must  admit  that  it  was 
something  of  an  interloper — looked  on  askance  in  the 
more  regular  and  full-dress  forms  of  poetry,  and  taught 


v  INTERCHAPTER  V  201 

mainly  in  the  hedge  schools  thereof.  But,  as  we  have 
seen  before,  the  hedge  school  is  sometimes  the  depository 
of  the  truest  doctrine. 

Nor  should  there  be  the  slightest  reluctance  in  admit- 
ting this,  or  the  slightest  sorrow  or  surprise  at  it,  even 
among  those  who  believe  that  trisyllabic  intermixture, 
and  trisyllabic  domination  at  times,  are  essential  to  the 
perfect  development  of  English  prosody.  To  everything 
there  is  a  season  ;  and  to  every  season  there  are  certain 
things  to  which  it  should  chiefly  devote  itself.  The  special 
things  to  which  this  great  period  had  to  devote  itself 
were  the  enfranchising  and  varying  of  blank  verse,  and 
the  thorough  establishment  of  rhymed  verse  on  a  basis 
of  regularity,  that  should  escape  sing-song  and  observe 
variety — regard  being  in  all  cases  had  to  the  warding  off 
of  any  return  to  doggerel. 

And  so  far  as  it  is  concerned — so  far  as  the  flourish- 
ing time  of  the  authors  chiefly  dealt  with  extends — we 
may  almost  say  that  it  did  its  work  as  impeccably  as  is 
consistent  with  human  experiment  and  tentative.  In  the 
more  dangerous  and  problematical  task  of  delimiting  the 
province  of  blank  verse,  it  perhaps  went  near  to  over- 
stepping, if  it  did  not  actually  overstep,  the  bounds  ;  and 
it  was  left  to  Milton,  after  those  bounds  had  been  not 
merely  overstepped  but  overrun  in  the  most  disorderly 
fashion,  and  indeed  nearly  overthrown,  to  take  order 
further  with  the  matter.  But  in  regard  to  the  thorough 
reformation,  advancement,  and  perfecting  of  rhymed  verse, 
especially  in  stanza  form,  there  is  no  such  exception  to 
take  to  it.  It  left,  no  doubt,  something  to  be  done  in 
respect  of  both  forms  of  couplet,  and  still  more  of  trisyl- 
labic verse,  but  it  cannot  be  justly  charged  with  having 
even  initiated — even  given  far-off  symptoms  of — degrada- 
tion in  either. 

In  particular,  the  regeneration  of  the  stanza  in  almost 
every  form,  from  the  Spenserian,  the  sonnet,  and  the 
great  ode-strophes,  down  to  the  smallest  combinations  of 
lyric,  and  its  information  with  poetical  spirit  by  the  way 
of  rhythm,  are  marvellous  things  to  contemplate.  As  we 


202  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK 

have  shown  fully  in  the  first  volume,  English,  as  soon  as 
it  had  received  its  true  prosody,  had  early  shown  itself 
prolific  in  elaborate  stanza-forms,  and  before  the  dark 
quarter  of  the  Early  English  moon,  Chaucer  had,  in 
rhyme-royal,  shown  this  capacity  of  our  language  for 
stanza  in  all  but  the  highest  degree.  But,  except 
Chaucer  and  a  few  anonyms,  there  had  not  been  very 
many  poets  who  had  been  able  to  infuse  "  cry "  and 
varied  music  into  stanza-forms,  and  after  him  everything 
went  to  pieces  except  in  the  simplest  shapes  of  ballad 
and  carol.  The  intermediate  Elizabethans,  except 
Sackville,  had  to  some  extent  restored  regularity,  but 
without  acquiring  charm,  and  with  a  rather  limited 
amount  of  variety.  Now  all  this  was  changed.  From 
the  great  strophes  or  pseudo- strophes  of  Spenser's 
odes  through  the  sonnet,  the  regular  long-poem  stanzas 
from  the  Spenserian  to  the  quatrain,  and  the  zigzag 
designs  of  lyric,  complexity  and  variety  of  form  and  out- 
line were  combined  with  adequacy  of  music.  The  octo- 
syllable, complete  or  catalectic,  was  restored  and  perfected  ; 
the  fourteener  spirited  up  ;  the  Alexandrine  attempted  ; 
the  great  staple  line,  the  decasyllabic,  fingered  with  a 
conjurer's  prestidigitation  into  almost  every  conceivable 
contour  and  resonance.  The  possibilities  were,  of  course, 
not  nearly  exhausted,  for  they  are  inexhaustible  ;  even 
the  actual  development  of  them  was  to  be  busily  continued 
for  another  technical  "generation."  But  the  extent  to 
which  they  were  drawn  upon,  and  the  success  of  the 
drawings,  are  enormous  and  wonderful. 

Only  as  to  the  couplet  have  some  reservations,  already 
hinted  at,  to  be  formulated  a  little  more  distinctly.  It 
is  largely  and  well  practised  ;  as  we  have  seen,  one  great 
authority  is  at  least  asserted  to  have  declared  for  it  in 
preference  to  all  others  ;  and  another  seems  to  be  in  two 
minds  about  it — not  quite  to  know  what  to  think  on 
that  point.  But,  beyond  all  doubt,  a  certain  difficulty 
has  been  created  by  the  fact  that  its  great  exemplar, 
Chaucer,  is  an  exemplar  impossible  to  follow  exactly. 
Although  I  do  not  agree  (while  mentioning  them  for  all 


v  INTERCHAPTER  V  203 

honour)  with  those  who  hold  that  even  Spenser  confused 
Chaucer's  decasyllabics  with  a  kind  of  doggerel — although 
I  think  that  Mother  Hubberd's  Tale  absolutely  negatives 
this, — yet  I  feel  that  in  the  uncertainty  of  the  Elizabethan 
grasp  of  the  couplet — in  the  veering  and  yawing  between 
the  stopped  and  enjambed  forms  which  is  the  evident 
result,  not  of  a  designed  combination  of  the  two,  but  of 
an  irresolute  and  unclear  grasp  of  either — there  is  evidence 
that  the  prosodic  mind  was  not  made  up  about  it.  That 
making  up  of  the  mind  is  exactly  what  we  shall  have  to 
survey  in  the  next  two  Books.  But  even  here  admirable 
work  was  turned  out,  in  the  enjambed  form  especially  ; 
and  not  a  little  of  the  same  combination  of  method  and 
music  which  we  have  been  noticing  in  other  measures 
displays  itself  here  also. 

Lastly — for  this  chapter  is  in  a  sense  more  of  an 
instalment  than  most  of  our  Interchapters,  and  it  will 
have  to  be  supplemented  in  the  next  in  regard  to  the 
whole  or  major  Elizabethan  period — this  special  time 
deserves  the  high  credit  of  having  been  the  first  definitely 
to  enter  upon  the  study  as  well  as  the  practice,  the  apper- 
ception as  well  as  the  perception,  of  prosody.  That  any 
great  progress  was  made  in  this  direction  cannot  indeed 
be  said.  It  was  practically  impossible  that  there  should 
be  any  such  as  yet.  The  famous  bull  about  "  these 
roads  before  they  were  made "  applies  pretty  exactly. 
If  the  Elizabethan  critics  had  seen  the  Elizabethan 
poems  before  they  were  made,  they  might  have  had 
a  better  chance  of  understanding  and  blessing  the 
makers.  They  did  see  them  to  a  certain  extent  in  the 
making,  and  did  not  wholly  fail  to  bless.  But  the 
disadvantage  of  their  position  as  compared,  let  us  say, 
with  that  of  Aristotle,  is  obvious  and  undeniable.  Further, 
they  devoted  themselves  for  the  most  part  to  other  things 
than  pure  prosodic  study  ;  they  committed  themselves 
to  some  heresies  when  they  did  attempt  it ;  and  by  far 
the  greater  part  of  their  labours  in  its  province  was 
bestowed  on  the  worst  heresy  of  all.  Nor  did  any  of 
them,  till  Daniel,  take  the  orthodox  side  in  a  distinct 


204  THE  TIME  OF  SHAKESPEARE  BOOK  v 

and  satisfactory  fashion.  But  we  have  done  our  best  to 
account  for  this,  and  the  aberration  has  at  worst  the 
praise — not  such  a  faint  praise  as  may  be  thought — of 
having  "  got  itself  done." 

For  the  rest,  it  was  too  early  ;  and  the  business  of 
the  time  was  not  really  criticism  of  any  kind.  The 
garden  had  to  be  cultivated  ;  and  it  was. 


BOOK    VI 

LATER   JACOBEAN    AND   CAROLINE 
POETRY 


205 


CHAPTER    I 

MILTON 

Studies  of  Milton's  prosody  frequent — Reasons  for  this — The  early 
minor  pieces — The  Nativity  Hymn — The  Arcades,  etc. — Note 
on  Translations,  note — The  octosyllabic  group — The  Sonnets — 
Lycidas — Originality  of  its  form — Compared  with  Spenser — 
Analysis — Rationale  of  the  system — The  blank  verse — Comus 
— Paradise  Lost — The  abjuration  of  rhyme — Examination  of 
the  verse  —  Apostrophation  —  Paradise  Regained  —  Samson 
Agonistes — Attempts  to  systematise  apparent  anomaly — Mr. 
Bridges'  view — Discussion  of  it — Contrast  of  it  with  our  system 
— The  printing  argument  —  Cacophonies — The  "scanned  not 
pronounced  "  argument — Classical  parallels  and  comparisons — 
The  true  prosodic  position  of  Milton  —  Conclusion  on  uncon- 
tentious  points. 

THERE  is  no  English  writer  on  whose  prosody  so  much  studies  of 
in  proportion  has  been  written  as  on  Milton's  ;   and  the  pros°dys 
reasons  for  this  are  sufficiently  evident,  though  perhaps  frequent. 
the  strongest  of  all  in  reality  is  not  so  apparent  as  some 
others,  and  the  most  apparent  of  all  is  not  the  strongest. 
This  last  is  the  towering  reputation  of  Milton  as  a  poet ; 
yet  Shakespeare  is  in  that  respect  even  greater,  and  in 
proportion   Shakespeare's    prosody   has    received    far    less 
attention.       But    then    it    is    a   vast,   and    on   some   not  Reasons  for 
uncommonly  accepted    theories   of  the   subject,  a  rather thls- 
hopeless    example ;    while    Milton's    looks    comparatively 
plain  sailing.     Further,  there  is  an  obvious  and  piquant 
contrast  -  progress    of   the    sort  which   attracts   study,  in 
the    poet's   successive   devotion    to  rhyme   and    solemnly 
proclaimed  apostasy  from  it,  and  in  the  hardening  and 
ossifying  of  the  form  of  blank  verse   that   he  preferred. 

207 


208     LATER  JACOBEAN  &•  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

Thirdly,  there  is  the  point — obvious  again  to  everybody 
likely  to  take  the  slightest  interest  in  the  matter — that 
Milton  is  a  "  master  of  harmonies  "  such  as  we  have  had 
few.  But  more  really,  though  perhaps  more  secretly, 
potent  than  all  these  is  the  fact  that  he  provides  a  great, 
and  perhaps  the  last  great,  turning  or  settling  point  of 
English  versification.  Chaucer  brings  to  perfection,  as 
far  as  his  time  allows,  all  or  most  of  the  scattered 
tentatives  and  experiments  of  the  nonage.  Spenser,  after 
Chaucer's  garnerings  have  been  mostly  wasted,  and  when 
the  conditions  have  been  changed,  repeats  the  process  in 
a  certain  sense  finally,  but  only  to  a  limited  extent,  and 
with  respect  especially  to  the  stricter  stanza  -  forms. 
Shakespeare  opens  up  the  whole  possibilities  of  blank 
verse  in  the  direction  of  the  utmost  freedom,  and  illustrates 
the  freer  lyric  to  almost  an  equal  extent.  But  the 
freedom  of  blank  verse  turns  to  licence  and  slipshodness, 
and  that  of  lyric  to  a  certain  taste  for  meticulous  and 
petty  prettiness.  Then  comes  Milton,  and  leaving  in  his 
earlier  work  a  perpetual  monument  and  model  of  verse 
that  shall  have  all  reasonable  freedom  but  no  mere  loose- 
ness— of  rhymed  verse  that  shall  employ  rhyme  with 
some  of  its  cunningest  and  most  perfect  embellishments 
— takes  non-dramatic  blank  verse  in  hand  once  for  all, 
and  introduces  into  it  the  order,  proportion,  and  finish 
which  dramatic  blank  verse  had  then  lost,  and  which  it 
has  hardly  since  recovered.  The  history  is  indeed  not 
over  :  we  shall  have  abundance  of  error  and  right-doing, 
of  experiment  bad  and  good,  of  new  perfections  and  new 
shortcomings,  to  record.  But  we  shall  come  to  no  one — 
not  Dryden  nor  Pope,  not  Coleridge  nor  Keats,  not  Ten- 
nyson nor  Browning — who  occupies,  in  regard  to  general 
prosody,  the  same  position  as  these  four  poets,  of  whom 
we  are  now  to  deal  with  the  last.  For  the  very  reason,  in- 
dicated above,  of  the  pains  that  have  been  spent  by  others 
on  the  matter,  the  treatment  will  have  to  be  rather  more 
controversial  than  it  has  usually  been  ;  but,  for  that  very 
reason  it  is  all  the  more  desirable  to  stick  to  our  method, 
and  to  begin  with  a  rigidly  historical  account  of  the  facts. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  209 

In  the  poet's  earliest  work  —  postponing  the  early  The  early 
sonnets  for  notice  with  their  fellows — it  is  only  by  the  minor  pieces' 
operation  of  a  common  and  not  unamiable  but  very 
uncritical  fallacy  that  specially  "  vital  signs "  can  be 
detected.  Any  fairly  clever  boy  of  fifteen  with  a  taste 
for  poetry,  and  with  the  English  poetry  up  to  the  date 
of  the  first  -  folio  Shakespeare  before  him,  might  have 
written  the  two  Psalm  Paraphrases.  The  more  ambitious 
"  Death  of  a  Fair  Infant "  two  years  later,  does  its  Alex- 
andrine-tipped rhyme-royal  deftly  enough,  and  has  a  fore- 
cast of  the  future  in  the  use  of  the  compound  epithet,  which, 
however,  was  common  enough  in  Elizabethan  poetry. 
The  "  Trivial  Masque  " — as  one  might  call  the  "  Vacation 
Exercise,"  if  more  people  were  likely  to  know  what 
trivium  means — shows  a  great  advance  in  couplet  verse 
on  the  Paraphrases  and,  just  towards  the  close,  holds  out 
another  promise  —  that  of  the  faculty  of  dealing  with 
proper  names.  Of  the  Hobson  pieces  we  need  say  little  : 
Milton's  mirth  was  always  rather  dismal,  prosodically  and 
otherwise.  There  is  greater  merit  in  the  "  May  Morning," 
but  it  is  too  short  to  found  much  on  ;  and  though  the 
"  Shakespeare  "  lines  have  been  rather  unfairly  accused  of 
rhetoric,  conceit,  and  even  bombast — though  one  or  two 
of  them  are  really  fine  and  have  true  prosodic  throb  in 
them  l — they  call  for  no  stay. 

It  is  far  otherwise  with  "  On  the  Morning  of  Christ's  The  Nativity 
Nativity " ;  and  whatever  may  be  the  futility  of  the 
unfavourable  criticisms  of  this,  they  are  at  any  rate 
not  futile  as  showing  that  the  critics  have  no  ear  for 
verse.  It  was  written  in  1629,  when  all  the  great 
Elizabethans  proper  were  dead  or  soon  to  die,  and  before 
the  wonderful  parade  and  concert  of  Caroline  bird-song 
and  bird-feather  had  well  begun.  The  opening  stanzas 
of  rhyme-royal,  if  not  entirely  consummate,  have  some- 

1  Especially 

Under  a  star-ypointing  pyramid, 
and 

Dear  son  of  memory,  great  heir  of  fame, 

where  the  position  of  the  only  polysyllable  among  the  monosyllables  is  no 
novice's  work. 

VOL.  II  P 


210     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY     BOOKVI 

thing  individual  in  them,  and  at  any  rate  show  much 
more  prosodic  accomplishment  than  their  predecessors  on 
the  "  Fair  Infant "  four  years  earlier.  But  when  the 
"  Hymn "  proper  begins,  where  are  the  ears — or  being 
there,  of  what  length  can  they  be  ? — that  miss  a  wonderful 
nativity — speaking  with  reverence — in  the  world  of 
prosody  itself?  The  form1  is  6,  6,  10,  6,  6,  10,  8,  12, 
rhymed  aabccbdd.  We  have  seen  that  constructions  of 
this  kind  had  been  common  in  the  fourteenth-century 
lyrics,  and  the  fourteenth-fifteenth-century  miracle-plays, 
and  that  the  Elizabethan  poets,  even  before  Spenser,  but 
much  more  after  his  example,  had  also  been  prone  to 
them.  It  would  merely  take  a  certain  amount  of  time 
and  trouble  to  determine  whether  the  particular  combina- 
tion schematically  exists  before.  What  I  will  undertake 
to  say,  on  my  faith  and  function  as  a  historian  of  prosody, 
is  that  the  prosodic  turn  given  to  the  scheme  does  not. 
The  artist  is  young,  and  he  makes  a  few  slips.  His 
occasional  double  rhymes — there  are  very  few  of  them — 
were  better  away,  save  perhaps  in  the  last  stanza  ;  but 
this  does  no  serious  harm.  The  atmosphere  of  almost 
unearthly  solemnity  which,  very  mainly  by  pure  prosodic 
means,  he  has  thrown  over  the  whole  is  miraculous. 
It  cannot  be  an  accident  that  almost  without  exception 
(there  are,  in  fact,  only  two,  and  these,  "  around "  and 
"  amaze,"  are  more  apparent  than  real)  the  two  opening 
lines  in  each  stanza  end  with  a  monosyllable,  and  the 
proportion  of  the  rise  in  line-length  from  6,  10  to  8,  12, 
which  gives  the  main  distinction  from  Drummond,  is  not 
likely  to  be  accidental  either.  Trisyllabic  feet  are  very 

1  There  is  something  partly  like  it  in  Drummond's  Divine  Poems,  but  the 
splendid  coda  of  8,  12,  so  cunningly  appended,  is  wanting,  and  the  rhyme- 
order  is  very  inferior. 

Amidst  the  azure  clear 

Of  Jordan's  sacred  streams, 
Jordan  of  Lebanon  the  offspring  dear, 

Where  Zephyrs  flow'rs  unclose 

And  sun  shines  with  new  beams, 
With  grave  and  stately  grace  a  nymph  arose. 

Compare  also  Sir  John  Beaumont's  Ode  of  the  Blessed  Trinity. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  211 

rare  ;  the  stately,  almost  awestruck,  tone  of  the  verse 
rejects  them.  The  great  Miltonic  phrase,  "  that  twice- 
battered  God  of  Palestine,"  is  with  us  already  ;  but  this 
is  not  strictly  prosodic,  though  it  is  always  a  means  in 
prosody's  hand.  The  double  epithet,  which  always  neces- 
sarily affects  the  run  of  the  line  (from  the  fact  that  its 
syllables  are  closer  knit  than  those  of  two  words),  and 
that  "  science  of  names  "  in  which  Milton  has  had  no  rival 
but  Victor  Hugo,  and  which  is  prosodic  or  nothing — these 
are  with  us  too.  And  "  everything  goes  in  " — everything 
works  together  for  a  steady  rise  in  each  stanza,  and  from 
stanza  to  stanza  through  the  whole  poem — like  volumes 
of  incense  rolling  higher  and  higher.1  It  used  to  be  a 
joke  to  compose  fancy  reviews,  pooh-poohing  great  works 
in  literature  at  their  appearance.  I  am  not  in  the  least 
afraid  of  what  I  should  have  said  of  "  On  the  Morning 
of  Christ's  Nativity  "  if,  per  impossibile  in  many  ways,  it 
had  been  sent  me  in  a  parcel  at  the  beginning  of  1630 
for  criticism. 

Much   less  need   be  said  of  the  other  strictly  minor  The  Arcades, 
poems.     The  "  Marchioness  of  Winchester  "  epitaph  goes  etc< 
with  U  Allegro  and  //  Penseroso,  for  the  metre  of  which  it 
is  a  less  perfect  study.     The  very  beautiful  Arcades  stands 

1  Well  known  as  it  all  ought  to  be,  one  must  beautify  and  sanctify  the 
page  with  a  couple  of  stanzas — 

The  lonely  mountains  o'er, 
And  the  resounding  shore. 
A  voice  of  weeping  heard  and  loud  lament : 
From  haunted  spring  and  dale 
Edged  with  poplar  pale, 
The  parting  Genius  is  with  sighing  sent. 
With  flower-inwoven  tresses  torn, 
The  Nymphs  in  twilight  shade  of  tangled  thickets  mourn. 

In  consecrated  earth, 
And  on  the  holy  hearth, 

The  Lars  and  Lemures  moan  with  midnight  plaint. 
In  urns  and  altars  round, 
A  drear  and  dying  sound 
Affrights  the  Flamens  at  their  service  quaint ; 
And  the  still  marble  seems  to  sweat, 
While  each  peculiar  power  forsakes  his  wonted  seat. 

§§  xx.  and  xxi.,  Globe  ed.  pp.  490,  491. 


212     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

in  something  of  the  same  relation  to  Comus,  and  shows, 
in  more  ways  than  one,  Milton's  study  of  Lyly  and  Peele. 
The  solid  part,  as  we  may  say,  is  decasyllabic  couplet 
instead  of  blank  verse,  and  makes  one  sorry  that  we  have 
not  more  couplet  from  him  ;  and  the  two  exquisite  songs 
are  quite  Peelian  -Shakespearian.  So,  too,  the  prosodic 
forms  of  "  At  a  Solemn  Music,"  "  Time,"  and  "  The  Circum- 
cision "  are  chiefly  interesting  to  compare  with  the  choruses 
of  Samson  long  afterwards.  But  none  of  these  requires 
the  individual  attention  which  must  be  given  to  the 
octosyllables  of  L?  Allegro,  II  Penseroso,  and  Comus  ;  to  the 
Sonnets  ;  to  the  unique  form  of  Lycidas  ;  to  the  successive 
blank  verse  of  Comus,  Paradise  Lost,  Paradise  Regained, 
and  Samson,  and  to  the  already-mentioned  choruses  of 
this  latter.1 

The  octo-  "  Where  on  earth  did  you  get  that  style  ?  "  said  the 

syllabic  group,  astonished  Jeffrey  to  Macaulay  in  reference  to  his  Essay 


Note  on  !  There  are  some  metrical  experiments  not  elsewhere  tried,  and  therefore 

Translations,  of  interest,  in  the  Translations  of  the  Psalms,  which  are  a  good  deal  later  than 
the  body  of  the  minor  poems,  but  earlier  than  the  blank  verse.  They  do  not, 
however,  require  any  special  notice.  It  is  otherwise  with  the  famous 
version  of  the  Pyrrha  ode  of  Horace.  Milton  himself  tells  us  that  this  is 
rendered  "  almost  word  for  word  without  rhyme,  according  to  the  Latin 
measure,  as  near  as  the  language  will  permit."  Now  this  "Latin  measure" 
is  (and  it  must  be  remembered  that  Milton  carefully  subjoins  the  Latin  text)  — 

Quis  multa  gracilis  te  puer  in  rosa 
Perfusus  liquidis  urget  odoribus 
Grato,  Pyrrha,  sub  antro  ? 
Cui  flavam  religas  comam  ? 

And  Milton  Englishes  — 

What  slender  youth,  bedewed  with  liquid  odours, 
Courts  thee  on  roses  in  some  pleasant  cave, 

Pyrrha  ?     For  whom  bindst  thou 

In  wreaths  thy  golden  hair  ? 

Now  it  would  be  quite  a  fair  question,  "If  you  think  that  Milton 
elsewhere  used  trisyllabic  feet,  how  do  you  account  for  his  not  using  them 
here,  where  they  exist  in  the  original  to  which  he  says  he  has  kept  "in 
measure  as  near  as  the  language  will  permit  "  ?  It  is,  I  say,  quite  a  fair 
question,  but  I  am  not  careful  to  answer  it.  Milton  sees  that  the  trisyllabic 
feet  of  the  third  and  fourth  line  are  only  apparent  and  that  the  measure  is 
throughout  choriambic.  What  is  rather  surprising  is  that  he  did  not  try 
whether  his  favourite  combination  of  trochee  and  iambs  could  not  be  extended 
to  suit  it.  I  think  Milton's  ear  would  always  have  protected  him  against 
the  attempt  to  combine  dactyls  with  iambs  or  spondees  in  English.  With 
trochees  they  go  well  enough.  (See  below,  note,  p.  255.) 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  213 

on  Milton.  Nobody  need  have  asked  the  same  question 
of  Milton  himself  as  to  the  prosodic  style  of  L  Allegro,  II 
Penseroso,  and  the  lyrical  parts  of  Comus,  with  its  essay- 
pieces  in  the  "  Marchioness  of  Winchester  "  epitaph,  and 
the  Arcades.  It  is  probable  that  Milton  had  no  small 
knowledge  of  the  octosyllable-heptasyllable,  which  had 
been  almost  the  earliest  and  quite  the  most  constant 
form  of  English  metre.  We  know  that  he  knew  Chaucer  ; 
there  can  be  no  reasonable  doubt  that  he  knew  Gower 
and  Lydgate  ;  and  it  would  be  odd  if,  when  his  "  younger 
feet  wandered  "  in  that  maze  of  romance x  of  which  they 
never  wholly  forgot  the  blessed  secrets,  he  had  not  even 
further  extended  his  knowledge  of  this,  the  metre  (with 
the  romance-six)  of  the  English  versions.  But  his  im- 
mediate creditor,  though  more  modern,  was  far  more 
illustrious,  for  it  was  nobody  less  than  Shakespeare  him- 
self. It  might  not  be  fair — though  I  have  no  doubt 
about  the  matter  myself — to  allege  the  "  cat  with  eyes 
of  coal "  passage  in  Pericles,  which  is  prosodically  indis- 
tinguishable from  some  of  the  best  of  the  twin  character- 
poems  ;  but  it  is  also  not  in  the  least  needful.  As  early 
as  A  Midsummer  Nighfs  Dream  (if  not  earlier),  in  the 
opening  fairy  verses  of  the  Second  Act,  this  tripping 
measure — which  pirouettes  on  either  foot,  iamb  or  trochee, 
with  equal  ease,  and  "  twinkles  interchange  "  of  the  two 
with  almost  bewildering  but  never-failing  accuracy  and 
intricacy  combined — is  one  of  Shakespeare's  favourite 
woodnotes ;  it  recurs  through  this  play,  and  in  many 
others.  Here  Milton  had  nothing  to  reinforce,  to  reform, 
or  to  improve.  He  had  merely  to  catch  the  key-note 2 
and  carry  it  out  with  such  variation  of  his  own  as  he 
might,  with  such  perfection  as  he  could. 

Of  the   perfection   there  has  rarely  been  any  doubt. 

1  It  may  be  just  worth  while  to  remind  the  reader  that  a  long  rhyme-royal 
poem  on  Guy  of  Warwick  by  John  Lane,  a  friend  of  Milton's  father,  actually 
exists  in  MS.  with  a  commendatory  sonnet  by  the  elder  Milton  himself.     See 
Mr.  Ward's  Catalogue  of  Romances  in  the  MS.   Department  of  the  British 
Museum^  \.  497  (London,  1883). 

2  Some  will  have  it  that  he  caught  it  from  or  through  Fletcher.     But  this 
is  not  a  study  of  all  Milton's  possible  sources  or  teachers.     Shakespeare  was 
quite  enough  for  him,  as  for  Fletcher  himself. 


214     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

Even  Johnson  could  find  no  fault  with  the  two  main 
instances,  though  he  probably  did  not  like  the  admixture 
of  the  mode  in  Comus ;  and  it  was  reserved  for  the  duller 
pedantry  of  John  Scott  of  Amwell,  and  Vicesimus  Knox, 
in  the  darkest  dark  of  neo-classic  night  before  the  dawn 
Romantic,  to  fall  foul  of  it.  But  they  are  hardly  important 
enough  to  give  any  valid  answer  to  a  Quis  vituperavit? 
The  ear  which  cannot  hear  the  music  of  U Allegro  and 
//  Penseroso,  or  of  the  even  greater  and  certainly  not  less 
sweet  close  of  Comus,  must  be  deaf  alike  to  the  harp  of 
Ariel  and  the  lute  of  Apollo. 

For  variation  or  idiosyncrasy  there  was  rather  less 
room.  Shakespeare  had  only  used  the  form  incidentally, 
but  he  had  used  it  not  infrequently  ;  it  is  not  a  form  of 
the  widest  range  in  itself,  and  Shakespeare  (as  has  been 
remarked  more  than  once  already)  had  a  knack  of  leaving 
very  few  "  numbers  to  fulfil "  for  those  who  came  after 
him.  Yet  Milton  has  done  a  good  deal,  not  merely  by 
his  subtle  power  of  fingering,  so  as  to  vary  scheme  with 
theme,  but  also  by  bringing  to  the  service  of  the  verse 
those  two  great  instruments  of  his  own  unique  phrase 
and  of  the  proper  name.  The  latter,  though  used  with 
some  freedom,  achieves  less  astounding  effects  than  in 
Lycidas  and  in  the  Paradises^  simply  because  the  shorter 
and  lighter  lines  do  not  require,  or  indeed  admit  of  it ; 
but  the  former  is  pushed  to  almost  its  possible  furthest. 
The  famous  "  light  fantastic  toe  "  (the  metre  itself)  is  an 
instance,  and  an  obvious  one  :  but  I  do  not  know  that  it 
is  so  wonderful  as  the  selection,  for  its  particular  place 
and  service,  of  such  a  word  as  "dappled,"  where  the 
darker  and  lighter  spots  or  streaks  of  the  dawn  are 
actually  represented  by  the  trochaic  rhythm.  Very 
noticeable,  too,  is  the  fashion  in  which  the  graver  effect 
in  //  Penseroso  is  attained  by  the  use  of  feet  which  are 
practically  spondees.  Milton,  it  was  observed  at  the 
beginning,  is  perhaps  the  first  English  non-dramatic  poet 
who  uses  the  spondee  much,  and  he  certainly  makes  the 
most  of  it  in  such  instances  as  the  magnificent 
Or  that  stared  £"thiop  Queen  that  strove  ; 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  215 

while  it  is  particularly  noticeable  that  he  scarcely  ever — 
I  think  never — clogs  the  trochaically  cadenced  lines  with 
these  feet,  but  keeps  them  for  double-shotting  the  pure 
iambics.  Not  very  much  can  be  done  with  pause  in  this 
short  line  ;  but  what  can  be,  Milton  does.  And  just  in 
passing,  he  writes  that  famous  verse — one  of  his  own 
finest  and  one  of  the  finest  in  English  poetry,  though 
later  ears  have  come  to  dislike  the  valued  "  i-5n  " — 

The  Cherub  Contemplation, 

to  be  in  future  days  at  once  a  choke-pear  and  a  stumbling- 
block  to  Dr.  Guest,  and  to  show  how  absolutely  wrong 
that  excellent  scholar's  general  theories  are.1 

The  sonnet  is  a  very  much  more  artificial-looking  The  Sonnets. 
form  than  the  octosyllable ;  and  Milton,  since  we  have 
abandoned  Johnson's  point  of  view,  has  been  generally 
held  to  be  one  of  our  most  "  artificzous  "  practitioners  of 
it.  I  am  myself  sorry  that  he  reverted  to  the  Petrarchian 
scheme  ;  but  it  is  not  surprising,  from  his  fondness  for 
Italian,  and  it  may  perhaps  be  admitted  that  the  subjects 
of  nearly  all  his  pieces  invite  if  they  do  not  exclusively 
demand  it  For  the  sonnet  passionate  or  the  sonnet 
meditative  the  English  form  is  at  least  the  equal  of  the 
Italian  ;  but  for  sonnets  descriptive,  sonnets  of  address 
to  persons,  and  the  like,  it  is  perhaps  less  good.  In  the 
former  cases  the  final  couplet  clenches  ;  in  the  latter  the 
final  tercet  softens  the  close — flourishes  it  off,  as  it  were. 
The  fanatics  of  division  and  of  rule  generally,  may  be 
shocked  at  the  "  Nightingale  "  for  splitting  itself  absolutely 
in  sense  and  sound  at  the  middle  of  the  seventh  line.2 
Our  side  will  simply  say,  "  Why  not  ?  "  But  nobody,  I 
suppose,  putting  some  ugly  rhyme  aside,  will  question 
the  majesty  of  the  "  Three-and-Twentieth  Year,"  though 
that  majesty  may  seem  already  to  carry  with  it  a  certain 
stiffness — a  castiliano  which  is  too  likely  to  become  vulgo. 
"  Captain  or  Colonel "  is  prosodically  noteworthy,  not 

1  Ed.  Skeat,  p.  184.     It  will  be  better  discussed  when  we  come  to  Guest 
himself. 

2  Compare  the  "double  rhyme-royal"  noticed  at  vol.  i.  p.  308. 


2 1 6     LA  TER  JA COBEAN  &*  CAROLINE  POETR  Y     BOOK  vi 

only  for  the  extreme  beauty  of  its  close  and  (less 
favourably)  for  the  dysphony  of  line  six — 

That  call  fame  on  such  gentle  acts  as  these, 

where  the  spondaic  effect  could  be  dispensed  with,  as  it 
could  not  in 

Whatever  clime  the  sun's  bright  circle  warms — 

but  for  the  fact  that  the  beauty  of  the  sixain  is  largely 
due  to  three  or  even  four  trisyllabic  feet — "  Ema[thian 
con|queror  "  ;  "  tem|ple  and  tower  "  ;  and  "  the  Athenian 
walls."  Of  course,  the  people  who  believe  in  elision,  and 
especially  in  Miltonic  elision,  will  cry  "  I  object ! "  here. 
But  they  cannot  steal  the  syllables  from  me,  if  they  can 
from  themselves.  Securus  scando. 

So  is  it  with  "  Pi|ty  and  ruth"  and  "thy  o|dorous 
lamp "  in  the  "  Virtuous  Young  Lady,"  which  is  also 
noticeable  (though  scarcely  more  so  than  all  these  sonnets) 
for  the  very  great  part  which  the  pause  plays  in  it 
Hardly  in  Paradise  Lost  itself  does  Milton  use  this  pedal 
action  more  powerfully.  In  the  "  Lady  Margaret "  I 
believe  the  persons  just  referred  to  scan  "  fajtal  to  lib  erty  " 
"  fat'l  to "  ;  but  as  this  is  a  collocation  of  sounds  which 
my  tongue  cannot  express,  and  my  ear  rejects  with  horror, 
I  prefer  the  fact  to  the  non-fact.  One  need  say  nothing 
on  the  first  "  Tetrachordon  "  piece,  except  that  the  people 
who  seriously  rebuke  Milton  for  splitting  Mile-End  between 
two  lines  seem  to  show  that  there  is  an  absence  of  humour 
more  absolute  even  than  his  own.  The  second  must  always 
live,  in  minds  that  care  for  verse,  by  the  gorgeous  line — 

Which  after  held  the  Sun  and  Moon  in  fee. 

But  the  "  New  Forcers  "  might  pair  off  with  "  Tetra- 
chordon I."  if  it  were  not  for  the  interesting  prosodic 
experiment  of  the  "  tailed "  sonnet.  I  wish  I  knew 
whether  Milton  did  this,  as  he  did  the  rhyme-split  in  the 
other,  with  burlesque  intent  ; *  or  whether  it  was,  if 

1  The  Italians  undoubtedly  did,  and  do,  this  ;  see,  for  instance,  Carducci's 
delightful  "  Pietro  Fanfani  e  le  postille,"  which  the  soul  of  Catullus  must 
have  chuckled  at  and  applauded.  And  some  precisions  of  "  kind "  would 
associate  it  especially  with  offensive  or  satiric,  not  merely  burlesque,  purpose. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  217 

perhaps  only  in  part,  a  genuine  experiment  in  a  form 
more  spacious  than  the  quatorzain.  At  any  rate,  I  rather 
wonder  why  more  poets  have  not  followed  it  from  this 
latter  point  of  view.  The  thing  is  obviously  close  to 
the  old  long  stanzas  with  "  bob  and  wheel  " — things  so 
thoroughly  English  that  they  deserved  resuscitation. 

The  beautiful  "  Lawes "  sonnet  is  doubly  and  trebly 
ours.  For  it  shows  us  that  Milton  did  not  confuse 
musical  and  poetical  music  as  so  many  have  done  and  do  ; 
that  he  recognised  "  short  and  long  "  as  the  capital  prosodic 
terms,  and  that  he  objected,  as  all  good  poets  have 
objected,  to  the  neglect  of  these  by  composers.  As  for 
"  committing,"  it  has,  I  believe,  been  differently  interpreted, 
but  the  sense  seems  to  me  not  in  the  least  ambiguous. 
There  is,  however,  a  prosodic  side  to  the  device  adopted 
(of  course  from  the  Italians)  by  Milton,  and  copied  almost 
ad  nauseam  by  his  followers,  of  beginning  the  sonnet  with  an 
appellative,  "  Harry,"  "Cromwell,"  "Fairfax,"  "Vane," etc.  It 
has,  of  course,  a  certain  arresting  effect ;  and  as  you  are  not 
supposed  to  read  more  than  one  of  the  sonnets  at  once,  the 
objection  that  it  gets  monotonous  and  tricky  is  not  wholly 
valid.  But,  to  my  taste  at  least,  it  gives  the  sonnet  rather 
too  much  of  declamatory  tone,  and  interrupts  the  steady 
rise  which  the  trisyllabic  metrical  clause  of  Shakespeare 
(v.  sup.  p.  60)  so  admirably  achieves.  In  all  of  these, 
however,  those  prosodic  "  rosin-secrets  "  of  Milton's  which 
have  been  already  referred  to  appear,  and  especially  his 
hardly  excelled  power  of  knitting  the  whole  of  a  verse- 
paragraph  into  one  by  variation  of  pause  and  weight. 
To  Milton,  indeed,  the  sonnet  is  not  much  more  than  a 
form  of  verse -paragraph  ;  and  (valeat  quantum}  this 
peculiarity,  in  which  he  is  followed  by  Wordsworth,  seems 
to  me  to  put  him,  as  a  sonnetteer,  not  merely  below 
Shakespeare  but  below  Keats  and  Rossetti.  The  magni- 
ficence, however,  prosodic  as  other,  of  the  "  Piedmont " 
piece  is  undeniable  ;  and  though  its  end  is  weak  poetically 
and  logically,  "  Babylonian "  saves  it  from  the  point  of 
view  of  prosody,  while  it  damns  it  from  others.  As  for 
"  On  his  Blindness,"  not  only  sorrows  but  admirations  are 


2 1 8     LA  TER  JA  CO  BE  AN  &*  CAROLINE  POE  TR  Y    BOOK  vi 

silent  when  they  reach  a  certain  magnitude.  It  could 
not  be  better ;  and  it  is  really  curious  that,  different  as 
are  the  schemes,  it  is  the  most  Shakespearian  of  all.  Nor 
are  the  succeeding  four  much  inferior.  But  the  quality 
of  the  prosody  in  all  may  (without  offence  meant)  be 
characterised  as  tending  towards  the  rhetorical.  Here 
one  understands,  even  when  one  does  not  share,  Johnson's 
suspicion,  in  another  division,  of  the  "  periods  of  the  de- 
claimer  "  as  intruders  into  verse.1 

Lycidas.  The  opinion  of  the  same  great  but  strongly  "condi- 
tioned "  critic  on  Lycidas  is  one  of  the  best-known  things 
relating  to  prosody.2  It  is  as  certain  as  anything  involving 
a  point  of  taste  can  be,  that  that  opinion  was  wrong ;  it 
is  equally  certain  that  the  fault  lay  in  the  critic's  premisses, 
not  in  his  reasoning.  If  extremely  regular  verse,  with 
rhymes  even  more  regular  still,  is  the  best  kind  of  verse — 
a  kind  from  which  everything  else  is  a  falling  short ;  much 
more,  if  this  is  the  only  kind  of  verse  that  is  much  worth 
aiming  at, — then  Johnson's  unfavourable  judgment  on 
the  versification  of  Lycidas  is  justified  in  every  detail.  If, 
however,  any  such  standard  as  this  is  a  fond  thing  vainly 
invented  ;  if  regular  verse  and  regular  rhyme  are  good 
things  in  their  way,  but  "  irregular  "  verse  and  "  irregular  " 
rhymes  good  things  in  another,  and  sometimes  an  even 
better  way, — then  the  judgment  may  be  "antiquated." 
And,  not  in  the  least  by  childish  exaggeration  and  con- 
tradiction, but  in  strict  accordance  with  the  principles  and 
the  observed  results  of  this  whole  inquiry,  we  may  be 
able  to  find  cause  for  pronouncing  Lycidas  prosodically 
one  of  the  very  masterpieces  of  English  poetry,  displaying 

1  May  I  make  a  little  excursion-protest  against  the  interpretation  of  "  spare 
to  interpose  "  in  the  Lawes  sonnet  as  equivalent  to  "refrain  from  interposing"? 
It  is  against  the  tenor  not  merely  of  the  sonnet  itself,  but  of  the  Cyriac  one. 
Moreover,  Milton  knew  his  Shakespeare  too  well  not  to  remember — 

If  Clifford  cannot  spare  his  friends  a  curse, 

and  meant,  I  feel  sure,  "  Spare  time  to  interpose  them  oft."  Why  not  let  him 
be  a  good  fellow,  on  the  not  too  frequent  possibilities  ? 

2  It  is  not,  however,  one  always  exactly  quoted.     The  actual  words  in  the 
Life  are  :  "  Lycidas  :  of  which  the  diction  is  harsh,  the  rhymes  uncertain,  and 
the  numbers  unpleasing."     Perhaps  I  should  add  that  I  take  Lycidas  before 
Comus,  partly  because  of  its  brevity,  and  partly  to  get  the  blank  verse  together. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  219 

a  virtuosity  at  once  in  diction,  numbers,  and  rhyme  hardly 
paralleled  elsewhere,  and  yet  converting  this  from  mere 
virtuosity  —  from  pretentious  and  elaborate  art  —  into 
something  more  like  actual  nature,  in  its  unforced  and 
ripened  mellowness. 

The  term  Monody,  which  Milton  himself  applies  to 
this  poem,  has  two  senses  in  Greek ;  and  it  is  probable 
that  the  poet  intended  to  adopt  both.  One  concerns  form, 
and  denotes  a  solo-piece  as  opposed  to  the  combined 
choric  ode  ;  the  other  concerns  matter,  and  is  equivalent 
by  customary  restriction  to  "  lament  "  or  "  dirge."  That 
Milton  had  the  actual  choruses  of  Greek  tragedy  in  his 
mind  there  can  be  no  doubt ;  but  he  is  certain  also  to 
have  had  before  him  the  less  rigidly  concerted  odes  of 
various  English  predecessors,  specially  those  two  great 
ones  of  his  master  Spenser,  to  which  we  have  tried  to  do 
justice  in  their  place.1  From  these  two  modes,  however,  Originality  of 
though  passages  of  the  three  poems  possess  a  not  dissimilar  lt; 
rhythmical  arrangement,  he  parted  in  the  first  instance  by 
making  his  stanzas  much  less  uniform.  Spenser  had 
adopted  stanza-forms  so  long  that  they  would  hardly  strike 
the  ear  as  stanzas  had  it  not  been  for  the  refrains  which 
tip  and  outline  them,  but  of  pretty  uniform  length — 
eighteen  lines  throughout  the  Prothalamion  and  at  the 
beginning  and  end  of  the  Epithalamion,  nineteen  in  the 
body  of  the  latter.  Milton  discards  the  refrain  altogether  ; 
and  attempting  no  uniform  stanza-length  at  all,2  converts 
the  stanzas  (for  stanzas  they  still  are  after  a  fashion)  into 
something  once  more  like  his  beloved  verse-paragraph — 
definitely  finished,  and  corresponding  to  others  like  a 
paragraph  of  prose,  but,  like  prose  paragraphs  themselves, 
acknowledging  no  obligation  of  corresponding  length. 
Again,  he  uses  that  not  infrequent  shortening  of  the  line 
which  is  indispensable  to  verse  that  is  to  have  the  choric 

1  The  Prothalamion  and  Epithalamion  ;    v,  sup.  i.  362. 

2  Thereby,  no  doubt,  aggravating  his  "  uncertainty  "  and  "  unpleasingness  " 
in  Johnson's  eyes ;  though  the  Doctor  and  his  sect  did  not  love  even  regular 
stanzas.     Of  course,  Milton  had  the  canzone  in  mind  more  or  less  directly.     I 
need  hardly  keep  the  warning  bell  of  "  Italian  "  constantly  ringing  in  regard 
to  him.     But  the  canzone  is  regular. 


220     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vx 

Compared  or  odic  effect ;  but  he  uses  it  less  frequently  than  Spenser 
with  Spenser.  &ntj  wjt]1  very  much  jess  regularity.  Still,  his  most  audacious 
and  most  successful  innovation  is  in  regard  to  the  rhyme  ; 
and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it  was  this  which  most 
annoyed  Johnson's  ear,  accustomed  and  enslaved  as  it  was 
to  the  clock-tick  of  the  couplet.  Spenser  intertwines  his 
rhymes,  of  course,  but  he  does  it  with  considerable,  if  not 
with  absolute  regularity,  on  the  ordinary  stanza-plan ; 
though  the  great  range  of  his  model  to  some  extent 
disguises  this  regularity.  But  Milton  does  not  merely 
not  attempt  —  it  is  quite  clear  that  he  deliberately 
eschews — a  regular  rhyme-scheme  of  any  kind.  He  will 
suit  his  rhyme  to  the  exigences  of  his  individual  paragraph, 
and  to  nothing  else. 

Thus  we  have  a  first  paragraph  of  fourteen  lines,  all 
of  five  feet,  except  line  4,  which  is  of  three  only,  but 
rhymed  oabbaacdacdaoa}  where  two  of  the  lines  are  blanks  ; 
and  there  are  only  five  rhymes  altogether,  but  one  of  these 
occurs  no  less  than  six  times.  Now,  Spenser,  in  his 
eighteen-  or  nineteen-line  stanzas,  had  !  usually  had  at 
least  eight  rhymes,  and  had  never  repeated  any  more  than 
four  times. 

Analysis.  Milton's  second  paragraph-stanza  is  much  shorter,  but 

more  varied  in  line-length,  consisting  of  eight  lines,  10, 
i  o,  i  o,  I  o,  6,  i  o,  6,  i  o,  rhymed  oaabbcco,  or  of  two  blank- 
verse  lines  enclosing  (as  it  were)  three  couplets.  The 
third  discards  the  blank  first  line  altogether  ;  and  of  its 
lines — fourteen  once  more — only  one  is  not  five-foot,  and 
that  is  one  of  Milton's  favourite  catalectic  octosyllables  of 
optionally  trochaic  rhythm,  though  it  may  be  taken  as  three 
feet  only,  and  iambic.  The  rhymes  are  aabcbcddeffegg, 
a  concerted  effect  approaching  nearer  to  Spenser  than  the 
two  others.  The  mere  skeleton  analysis  of  the  rest, 
though  of  considerable  importance  except  to  "  ignorant 
impatience,"  may  be  relegated  to  a  note.^  ^  The  poem 

1  I  may  remind  the  reader  that  I  use  o  for  a  non-corresponding  end-syllable. 
Two  or  more  o's  do  not  rhyme  to  each  other  or  to  anything  else. 

2  Fourth,  thirteen  lines — 10,  10,  10,  10,  6,  10,  6,  10,  10,  10,  10,  6,  10 ; 
rhymed  abcabddefegfg. 

Fifth,  fourteen  lines — all  tens  but  1.  7,  which  is  a  six  ;  aoabbccdedfefe. 


CHAP.  I  MILTON  221 

ends  with  its  first  regular  "  stanza  " — an  octave  of  even 
decasyllabics  rhymed  abababcc.  But  no  two  others  are  alike 
in  length,  line-composition,  or  rhyme-arrangement. 

Thus  the  first,  and  perhaps  the  last,  impression  pro-  Rationale  of 
duced  by  the  poem  is  that  of  the  extremest  prosodic the  system- 
variety ;  and  it  may  very  well  be  that  Johnson  failed 
entirely  to  catch  the  symphonic  effect  which  this  variety 
admits  and,  in  fact,  produces.  It  is  not  quite  certain  that 
everybody  sees  it  now  ;  but  there  is  no  doubt  about  it ; 
and  this  symphonic  effect  is  very  mainly  produced  by 
the  uncertainty  of  the  rhymes  themselves.  With  stanzas 
of  regular  length,  and  regularly  rhymed,  the  individual 
stanza  is  what  chiefly  takes  the  attention  ;  and  when  it  is 
mastered,  there  is  mere  repetition.  Here  the  attention, 
aroused  at  first  by  the  failure  of  the  rhyme — it  was 
probably  for  this  reason  that  Milton  left  both  the  opening 
lines  of  the  first  two  stanzas  blank — is  reassured  by  the 
prompt  appearance  of  it,  and  yet  warned  by  the  irregularity 
of  that  appearance  that  it  must  not  go  to  sleep.  The 
frequent  but  spasmodic  occurrence  of  the  a  rhyme  in 
Stanza  One  clenches  this  appeal,  this  satisfaction,  and  this 
warning  at  once.  Never  till  the  end — when  the  regular 
octave  is  probably  intended  to  have  something  like  the 
effect  of  the  Shakespearian  end-couplet  to  a  blank-verse 
tirade — is  the  interest  of  uncertainty  and  chance  allowed 
to  drop ;  seldom  is  expectation  defrauded  by  blank  lines  ; 
and  yet  the  evident  possibility  of  these  heightens  the 
pleasure  of  the  ear  when  the  rhyme  comes.  Besides 
this,  the  recurrence  has  a  knitting  effect  within  the  para- 
graph, while  its  disappearance  marks  the  paragraph  close. 
That  this  would  be  a  very  dangerous — indeed,  an  almost 
hopeless — game  for  any  one  but  an  exceptional  master  of 

Sixth,  twenty-one  lines — all  tens  but  the  six  at  1.  16  ;  abccbadededfdfgghhoii. 

Seventh,  eighteen  lines — 10,  10,  10,  6,  10,  6,  10,  10,  10,  10,  7,  10,  10, 
10,  10,  10,  10,  IO ;  ababccoodtedfgfhhg. 

Eighth,  twenty-nine  lines — all  tens  except  the  sixth,  which  is  six  ;  rhymed 
abbabacddcdcecffefghf,  ih  ihihjj. 

Ninth,  thirty-three  lines — all  tens  except  six  at  1.  14  ;  rhymed  ababbccdeedf- 
ggfijijklklm  In  m  npopgg. 

Tenth,  twenty-one  lines — all  tens  ;  ababbaccdtdeffgfghhii. 

Eleventh,  or  coda,  described  in  text. 


222     LATER  JACOBEAN  &-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

harmonies  to  play,  hardly  needs  insisting  on.  It  is  a  sort 
of  game  of  Japanese  butterflies — things  which  the  conjurer 
casts  into  the  air  to  flit  and  flutter  among  themselves,  till 
it  is  time  for  them  to  float  down  and  settle.  And  to 
effect  it,  he  has  to  resort  to  every  minor  device  of  pause 
and  line-weighting  and  lightening,  quickening  or  slacking 
off,  with  all  the  science  of  names  and  words  that  he  can 
muster.  "  Everything  [once  more]  goes  in  "  ;  his  beloved 
Chaucerian  trick  of  putting  one  epithet  before  and  one 
after  the  noun,  which  inevitably  "  holds  up  "  the  phrase  ; 
the  more  curious  but  certain  arrangement  of  a  pair  of 
epithetted  nouns,  where  in  one  case  the  noun  is  mono- 
syllabic and  the  epithet  dissyllabic,  and  in  the  other  the 
values  change  over.  Of  the  names  themselves,  probably 
the  greatest  instance,  even  in  Milton,  occurs,  as  does  the 
device  just  mentioned,  in  the  famous  lines — 

Sleep'st  by  the  fable  of  Bellerus  old, 

Where  the  great  vision  of  the  guarded  Mount 

Looks  towards  Namancos  and  Bayona's  hold. 

I  always  wish  Dionysius  and  Longinus  could  have  known 
— as  indeed  they  may  know — this  incomparable  illustration 
of  their  joint  doctrine  of  the  "  beautiful  word."  * 

It  must  be  evident  to  any  one  who  reads  Lycidas 
carefully,  that  it  is  in  effect  a  piece  of  blank  verse  carefully 
equipped  with  rhyme,  for  the  purpose,  technically  speaking, 
of  providing  it  with  a  lyric  vehicle.  The  pause-arrangement 
is  quite  that  of  blank  verse,  modified  a  little  by  the  fact 
of  the  rhyme,  which  relieves  pause  of  some  of  the  duties 
that  fall  upon  it  in  pure  blanks.  His  system,  moreover, 
has  freed  the  poet,  almost  automatically,  from  the 
tendency  to  adopt  the  stopped  Marlowesque  line-form 
which,  as  we  shall  see,  is  so  frequent  in  Comus,  and  he 
stops  or  enjambs  as  he  pleases  ;  in  fact,  there  are  things 
in  Lycidas  not  unsuggestive  of  the  enjambed  couplet  which 
the  author's  contemporaries  were  abusing  and  to  abuse. 
Spondees  are  not  infrequent  and  very  effective,  as  in 

1  It  is  all  the  more  interesting  that,  as  we  know  from  the  Cambridge  MS., 
Milton  first  used  "  Corineus,"  and  then  substituted  the  far  more  obscure,  but 
in  the  place  far  more  euphonious,  "  Bellerus." 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  223 

Together  both  ere  the  high  lawns  appeared, 
and  the  perhaps  more  doubtful  one  in 

Battening  our  flocks  with  ihefrestt  dews  of  night, 
and  the  certain  one,  again,  of 

Set  off  to  the  world,  nor  in  broad  rumour  lies. 

This  last  might  introduce  us  to  a  still  thornier  point — of 
which  I  shall  not  attempt  to  grapple  with  all  the  thorns 
till  presently — the  trisyllabic  feet  of  the  piece.  Once 
more,  I  have  not  been  furnished  by  nature  with  the  organs 
of  speech  needful  for  the  pronunciation  "  thwrld  "  in  any 
fashion  that  is  not  extremely  ugly  to  the  other  organs  of 
hearing  with  which  nature  has  provided  me  ;  while  the 
natural  "  to  the  world  "  appears  to  me  to  add  a  singular 
charm  to  the  line,  and  to  contrast,  in  specially  appropriate 
fashion,  with  the  subsequent  spondee  itself.  So,  too,  I 
have  no  doubt  about 

Shatter  your  leaves  before  the  mel|  lowing  year, 

or  "  melodious  tear,"  or  "  battening "  in  the  line  quoted 
above,  or  about  "  watery  bier "  and  "  westering  wheel," 
or  "  the  hideous  roar." 

But  there  is  in  Lycidas  one  trisyllabic  foot  which 
one  might  have  thought  indisputable  by  any  one,  and 
that  is  to  be  found  in 

O  fountain  Areihuse,  and  thou  honoured  flood ; 

for  Milton  was  about  the  last  person  to  take  liberties  with 
a  word  sacred  alike  in  classic  legend  and  prosody.  Nor 
do  I  think  him  likely  to  have  called  Virgil's  Mincius 
"  Minshus  "•;  the  loss  of  "  reckoning  "  in  St.  Peter's  speech 
would  be  grievous ;  and  it  is  strange  that  there  should  be, 
as  no  doubt  there  are,  people  who  prefer 

And  ev'ry  flow'r  that  sad  embroid'ry  wears, 

with  its  eighteenth -century  snipsnap,  to  the  winding 
sweetness  of 

And  every  flower  that  sad  embroidery  wears, 


224     LATER  JACOBEAN  &*  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

or  would  rather  force  "  loryate  "  in  the  place  of  "  laureate  " 
three  lines  lower,  or  would  throw  away  the  beauty  of 
"  perilous  "  before  "  flood  "  in  the  last  line  before  the  coda. 
So,  too,  those  who  like  "  thuncouth  "  or  "  thoaks  "  must,  I 
suppose,  have  one  or  the  other.  As  for  me  and  my  house, 
we  will  neither  of  them.1 

The  blank  It  is,  however,  beyond  all  question,  on  Milton's  blank 
verse  itself  that  the  main  attention  of  any  student  of  his 
period  must  be  concentrated.  Indeed,  that  prosody,  in 
this  particular  respect,  is,  as  was  remarked  above,  almost 
the  only  instance  in  which  the  versification  of  any  English 
author  has  been  seriously  subjected  to  serious  exami- 
nation, for  a  long  space  of  time,  and  from  very  different 
points  of  systematic  view.  This  is  natural  enough  when 
we  remember  the  almost  instantaneous  position  which 
Milton  attained,  the  way  in  which  dictators  of  literature 
like  Addison  and  Johnson  devoted  themselves  to  him, 
and,  above  all,  the  fact  that  he  was  the  first  to  establish 
this  peculiarly  English  form  of  metre  in  non-dramatic 
poetry.  Some  readers  would  perhaps  wish  to  have  a 
sketch  of  the  views  which  have  thus  come  into  being  as 
an  opening  of  the  inquiry  ;  but  I  prefer,  as  usual,  to  let 
Milton  himself  speak  before  seeing  what  other  people 
have  said  about  him.  And  in  most  cases  even  this  must 
wait  till  we  come  to  themselves,  lest  we  disturb  what  is 
almost  as  important  to  us  as  the  history  of  prosody 
itself,  the  history  of  prosodic  opinion. 

The  documents  of  the  inquiry  are,  as  everybody 
knows,  four,  but  may  perhaps  be  taken  as  presenting 
three  rather  than  four  stages  of  development  and  attitude. 
Comus  unquestionably  represents  the  poet's  youth  and 

1  I  must  take  leave  to  postpone  the  consideration  of  the  demur — "  But 
it  is  not  proposed  to  drop  the  pronunciation  of  elided  syllables."  It  may 
perhaps  be  asked,  "Does  not  the  Cambridge  autograph  settle  this  matter?" 
No,  it  does  not.  "Imbroidrie"  is  indeed  written  there;  but  "livery" 
appears  in  the  alternative  line  for  exactly  the  same  prosodic  value.  So 
earlier,  1.  12,  "  watrie,"  but  1.  29,  "glistering."  In  all  these  four  cases  the 
presence  or  absence  of  the  e  makes  a  trisyllabic  or  a  dissyllabic  foot  as  the  case 
may  be  ;  and  the  MS.  is  as  obstinately  yea-nay  as  if  it  were  a  counsellor 
of  Panurge. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  225 

early  manhood  in  life  and  literature  at  once  ;  Paradise 
Regained  and  Samson  Agonistes,  his  age.  The  verse  of 
Paradise  Lost,  published  not  long  before  the  latest  two, 
represents  either  successive  stages,  or  the  result  of 
successive  stages,  extending  over  some  twenty  years  at 
least.  Further  (to  get  all  the  facts  into  order  and 
position,  however  well  they  be  known),  the  first  and  the 
last  of  these  documents,  Comus  and  Samson,  are  in 
dramatic  form,  the  Paradises  in  narrative. 

The  kinds  of  drama  to  which  the  two  plays  belong 
are  not  quite  irrelevant  to  the  inquiry ;  but  they  may  be 
considered  too  curiously.  Comus  gives  itself  out  as  a  Comus. 
"  Masque,"  and  though  specialists  have,  in  their  usual 
way,  quarrelled  about  its  title  to  the  title,  the  plain  man 
will  not  imitate  them.  Comus  is  a  masque,  because  its 
author  called  (or  let  call)  it  so  ; 1  because  it  was  written 
to  be  acted  by  amateurs  ;  because  it  has  more  of  the 
supernatural  in  it  than  ordinary  plays  even  at  that  time 
admitted  ;  because  it  is  evidently  intended  for  music  ; 
and  because  there  is  large  spectacle  and  decoration  in  it. 
But  it  admits  also  much  more  regular  dialogue,  and 
rather  more  coherent  plot,  than  the  usual  masque  does  ; 
and  if  things  had  so  been  that  it  had  been  written  now, 
its  author  would  probably  have  called  it  "  a  Lyrical 
Drama."  Further  yet,  it  is  clear  that  the  writer  has 
immediately  before  him  such  things  of  Shakespeare's  as 
A  Midsummer  Nights  Dream  and  The  Tempest,  but  that 
he  is  also  paying  special  attention  to  the  University  Wits, 
and  has  not  exactly  cleared  his  prosodic  mind  of  the 
mixed  impressions  derived  from  these  studies.  Lastly, 
he  is  full  of  the  Greek  drama,  as  well  as  of  the  English. 
Peele  and  Shakespeare,  Marlowe  and  Euripides,  however 
"  confusedly "  (to  adopt  the  Shakespearian  word),  are 
before  his  eyes  as  the  inspirers  of  his  mimesis.  The  Old 
Wives'  Tale  is  actually  in  some  sort,  though  not  to  any 
great  extent,  his  canvas.  The  Attendant  Spirit  is  a 

1  In  fact,  as  ought  to  be  well  known,  he  never,  so  far  as  we  know, 
himself  called  it  anything  else,  Comus  itself  being  a  later  label  for  dis- 
tinction's sake. 

VOL.  II  Q 


226     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  fr  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

middle-aged  and  sedater  Ariel,  a  Puck  turned  serious. 
"  Divine  philosophy  "  gives  us  a  sort  of  assonanced  echo 
of  Tamburlaine's  "  divine  Zenocrate "  in  one  line,  and 
"  musical  as  is  Apollo's  lute  "  walks,  dropping  the  adjective 
"  bright,"  straight  out  of  Love's  Labour's  Lost  in  the  next 
but  one  ;  while  Comus  and  the  Lady  "  knap  verses " 
with  each  other  in  the  truest  style  of  Greek  stichomythia. 
The  poet  has  in  one  place  not  shaken  off  "  Ens  and  the 
Predicaments,"  and  is  didactic  in  a  way  which  would 
have  made  Aristotle  class  him  with  Empedocles  as 
doubtfully  a  poet,  and  Quintilian  put  him  in  the  "  middle  " 
division.  Elsewhere  he  is  altogether  run  off  with  by  his 
own  descriptive  exuberance,  and  may  well  release  his 
captor  from  all  damages  de  raptu  suo.  It  is  no  wonder 
that  pedants  of  the  parallel  -  passage,  pedants  of  kind, 
pedants  of  all  sorts,  have  more  or  less  shaken  their 
heads  over  Comtis :  while  those  who  care  for  poetry, 
and  for  poetry  only,  have  sometimes  been  profane 
enough  to  think  that  he  never  did  anything  much  more 
poetical. 

The  "  confusedness,"  however,  and  the  multiplicity  of 
aim  and  pattern  certainly  reflect  themselves  in  the  blank 
verse.  The  lyrics  show  nothing  similar  :  there  he  had 
already  mastered  his  instrument ;  it  had,  in  fact,  been 
mastered  for  him  and  before  him.  Here  he  had  not 
mastered  it,  and,  except  Shakespeare  in  rather  different 
conditions,  nobody  had.  The  consequence  is  that  the 
blank  verse  of  Comus  is  obviously  and  multifariously 
experimental.  The  opening  block  of  seventeen  lines *  is 

1  Before  the  starry  threshold  of  Jove's  court 
My  mansion  is,  where  those  immortal  shapes 
Of  bright  aerial  spirits  live  insphered 
In  regions  mild  of  calm  and  serene  air, 
Above  the  smoke  and  stir  of  this  dim  spot 
Which  men  call  Earth,  and,  with  low-thoughted  care, 
Confined  and  pestered  in  this  pinfold  here, 
Strive  to  keep  up  a  frail  and  feverish  being, 
Unmindful  of  the  crown  that  Virtue  gives, 
After  this  mortal  change,  to  her  true  servants 
Amongst  the  enthroned  gods  on  sainted  seats. 
Yet  some  there  be  that  by  due  steps  aspire 
To  lay  their  just  hands  on  that  golden  key 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  227 

very  carefully  and  regularly  written  ;  but  it  is  noteworthy 
that  it  has  not  the  paragraph  effect  at  all — that  the 
lines,  though  not  exactly  stopped,  have  something  of  the 
old  bullet-mould  model,  and  that  twice  the  poet  runs 
perilously  close  to  rhyme — "  care  "  and  "  here,"  still  more 
"  key  "  and  "  Eternity."  l  In  the  second  he  warms  to  his 
work  :  the  pauses  are  more  varied  and  the  lines  more  broken 
and  vari-cadenced,  while  the  paragraph  effect,  if  not  fully, 
is  nearly  achieved.  In  both  these  he  allows  himself  the 
redundant  syllable ;  though  those  who  think  he  called 
peril  "  per'r'r'l "  may  deny  this.  The  third  and  longest 
still  more  acquires  vires  eundo  \  and  here  there  are  two 
striking  licences  clearly  intended  to  subserve  variety  and 
symphonic  effect.  The  first  of  these  is  the  famous  line — 

To  quench  the  drouth  of  Phoebus,  which  as  they  taste, 

where  I  should  unhesitatingly  make  the  last  foot  an 
anapaest,  where  those  who  believe  in  the  amphibrach 
would  of  course  bring  the  longest  foot  into  the  fourth 
place,  and  where  others  would  resort  to  one  of  their  acts 
of  prosodic  escamotage  with  an  extrametrical  syllable  at  a 
caesura.  The  second  is — 

Soon  as  the  potion  works,  their  human  count'nance, 

where  I  should  (having  been  taught  to  distrust  "apos- 
trophation "  by  much  study  of  seventeenth -century 
originals)  as  unhesitatingly  restore  the  e  and  make  a  very 
effective  Alexandrine  (v.  inf.\ 

The   lyrical   entry   of    Comus    himself   indulges    in   a 
little    decasyllabic    couplet;    and   at   the   half -tempting, 

That  opes  the  palace  of  eternity. 
To  such  my  errand  is ;  and,  but  for  such, 
I  would  not  soil  these  pure  ambrosial  weeds 
With  the  rank  vapours  of  this  sin-worn  mould. 

It  may  be  worth  observing  that  in  the  Cambridge  MS.  there  is  a  long 
insertion  (14  lines  after  1.  4),  beautiful  in  itself,  but  even  less  paragraphic 
in  effect.  I  daresay  some  readers  would  like  more  reference  to  these 
variants,  but  I  must  once  more  plead  that  I  am  writing  three  volumes,  not 
thirty. 

1  The  blank-verse  Italians  have  often  done  this  ;  in  fact,  it  is  excessively 
difficult  to  prevent  in  Italian.  In  English  non-dramatic  blank  verse  it  is 
nearly  fatal ;  but  that  would  only  be  found  out  in  practice. 


228     LATER  JACOBEAN  &>  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

half- inconvenient  approach  of  the  Lady  he  breaks  off 
into  blanks  again.  They  have  more  of  the  spoken 
character — that  is  to  say,  more  of  the  strictly  conver- 
sational— than  the  overture  of  the  Spirit,  which,  naturally 
enough,  is  somewhat  Senecan  and  declamatory.  And 
this  reappears,  for  all  its  beauty,  in  the  long  soliloquy  of 
the  Lady  herself.  But  that  soliloquy  shows  increasing 
signs  of  the  period-  and  paragraph-"  fingering,"  which  is 
to  be  ubiquitous  in  Paradise  Lost.  Indeed,  Milton  has 
seldom  given  us  a  more  accomplished  verse-period  than 
that  (171-177)  from 

Methought  it  was  the  sound 

to 

And  thank  the  gods  amiss.1 

At  line  192  we  have  what  is  to  me  once  more  a 
pretty  certain  Alexandrine,  such  as  Milton  could  find 
dozens  and  scores  of  in  Shakespeare — 

Is  not  the  labour  of  my  thoughts.     Tis  likeliest, 

though  no  doubt  some  people  may  crumple  and  gobble 
up  the  end  into  a  mere  redundancy,  just  as  in  217  they 
may  spoil  a  striking  phrase  of  the  Lady — 

That  He,  the  Supreme  Good,  to  whom  all  things  ill, 

by  slurring  it  into  "  twom."  It  is  to  be  observed  that 
the  redundant  syllable  is  here,  and  continues  to  be,  very 
prevalent,  Milton  taking  his  latest  Shakespearian  model 
— that  of  The  Tempest. 

In  the  speech  of  Comus  which  follows  the  exquisite 
song  "  Sweet  Echo,"  the  last  half-dozen  lines  addressed 
to  the  Lady2  are  probably  intended  (she  seems  to  imply 

Methought  it  was  the  sound 
Of  riot  and  ill-managed  merriment, 
Such  as  the  jocund  flute  or  gamesome  pipe 
Stirs  up  among  the  loose  unlettered  hinds, 
When,  for  their  teeming  flocks  and  granges  full, 
In  wanton  dance  they  praise  the  bounteous  Pan, 
And  thank  the  gods  amiss. 

2  But  such  a  sacred  and  home-felt  delight, 
Such  sober  certainty  of  waking  bliss, 
I  never  heard  till  now.     I'll  speak  to  her, 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  229 

her  sense  of  it  in  her  answer)  to  bear  a  rhetorical  cast  of 
verse,  and  the  final  spondees,  "  Blest  song "  and  "  Tall 
wood,"  especially  the  latter,  must  have  been  designed  to 
impart  what  the  Greeks  called  67*05 — stateliness  and 
pomp, — while  the  stichomythia  that  follows  cannot  escape 
— it  never  does  escape  in  Greek  or  English  where  the 
lines  are  not  enjambed — a  rather  ludicrous  single-stick 
effect.1  In  fact,  Milton  has,  probably  of  purpose,  made 
the  enchanter's  versification  rather  ostentatiously  artificial. 
But  still  it  is  of  a  fairly  accomplished  and  late  character, 
suggesting  (what  is  perhaps  an  exact  enough  description 
of  it)  an  attempt  to  write  Tempest  verse  by  a  person  who 
has  almost  all  the  gifts,  but  not  quite  all  the  graces, 
required. 

It  is  all  the  more  interesting  to  find  the  next  scene 
relapsing  into  a  kind  of  verse  twenty  or  thirty  years  older. 
Lines  3  3 1-7  2  are  quite  early  Shakespeare,  if  not  even 
Marlowe — Titus  Andronicus,  if  not  Tamburlaine^ — and 

And  she  shall  be  my  queen. — Hail,  foreign  wonder ! 

Whom  certain  these  rough  shades  did  never  breed, 

Unless  the  goddess  that  in  rural  shrine 

DwelPst  here  with  Pan  or  Sylvan,  by  blest  song 

Forbidding  every  bleak  unkindly  fog 

To  touch  the  prosperous  growth  of  this  tall  wood. 

1  Comus.     What  chance,  good  Lady,  hath  bereft  you  thus  ? 
Lady.     Dim  darkness  and  this  leavy  labyrinth. 

Comus.     Could  that  divide  you  from  near-ushering  guides  ?, 

Lady.  They  left  me  weary  on  a  grassy  turf. 
Comus.     By  falsehood,  or  discourtesy,  or  why  ? 

Lady.  To  seek  i'  the  valley  some  cool  friendly  spring. 
Comus.     And  left  your  fair  side  all  unguarded,  Lady  ? 

Lady.  They  were  but  twain,  and  purposed  quick  return. 
Comus.     Perhaps  forestalling  night  prevented  them. 

Lady.  How  easy  my  misfortune  is  to  hit  ! 
Comus.     Imports  their  loss,  beside  the  present  need  ? 

Lady.  No  less  than  if  I  should  my  brothers  lose. 
Comus.     Were  they  of  manly  prime,  or  youthful  bloom  ? 

Lady.  As  smooth  as  Hebe's  their  unrazored  lips. 

2  Eld.  Bro.     Unmuffle,  ye  faint  stars  ;  and  thou,  fair  moon, 
That  wont'st  to  love  the  traveller's  benison, 

Stoop  thy  pale  visage  through  an  amber  cloud, 
And  disinherit  Chaos,  that  reigns  here 
In  double  night  of  darkness  and  of  shades  ; 
Or,  if  your  influence  be  quite  dammed  up 
With  black  usurping  mists  .   .   . 


230     LATER  JACOBEAN  £-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

though  there  is  plenty  of  overrunning  in  sense,  the  two 
Brothers  throughout  indulge  in  little  but  the  cumulative 
fashion  of  verse  in  sound.  Sometimes  blocks  of  the 
different  kinds  come  together  most  curiously,  as,  for 
instance,  428-440  contrasted  with  441-446,  and  this 
latter  again  with  4S6-463.1 

For  the  drop  into  couplets  of  495-512  I  do  not  think 
it  necessary  to  seek  any  further  explanation  than  that 
Milton  found  plenty  of  such  drops  in  Shakespeare,  and 
followed  the  example.  They  could  not  be  bad,  being 
his ;  but,  like  all  his  few  other  examples,  they  show 
clearly  why  he  never  much  affected  the  form.  This, 
I  think,  we  may  explain  by  the  observation  that  the 
couplet  did  not  give  him  that  variety  of  sound  which  he 
managed  so  exquisitely  in  irregularly  rhymed  lyric  of 
various  line-lengths,  and  that  his  mind  was  too  orderly 
and  logical  to  use  rhyme,  as  his  contemporary,  Chamber- 
layne,  did,  for  a  mere  running  accompaniment  to  para- 

1  Yea,  there  where  very  desolation  dwells, 
By  grots  and  caverns  shagged  with  horrid  shades, 
She  may  pass  on  with  unblenched  majesty, 
Be  it  not  done  in  pride,  or  in  presumption. 
Some  say  no  evil  thing  that  walks  by  night, 
In  fog  or  fire,  by  lake  or  moorish  fen, 
Blue  meagre  hag,  or  stubborn  unlaid  ghost, 
That  breaks  his  magic  chains  at  curfew  time, 
No  goblin  or  swart  faery  of  the  mine, 
Hath  hurtful  power  o'er  true  virginity. 
Do  ye  believe  me  yet,  or  shall  I  call 
Antiquity  from  the  old  schools  of  Greece 
To  testify  the  arms  of  chastity  ? 

Hence  had  the  huntress  Dian  her  dread  bow, 

Fair  silver-shafted  queen  for  ever  chaste, 

Wherewith  she  tamed  the  brinded  lioness 

And  spotted  mountain-pard,  but  set  at  nought 

The  frivolous  bolt  of  Cupid  ;  gods  and  men 

Feared  her  stern  frown,  and  she  was  queen  o'  the  woods.   ' 

Driving  far  off  each  thing  of  sin  and  guilt, 

And  in  clear  dream  and  solemn  vision 

Tell  her  of  things  that  no  gross  ear  can  hear  ; 

Till  oft  converse  with  heavenly  habitants 

Begin  to  cast  a  beam  on  the  outward  shape, 

The  unpolluted  temple  of  the  mind, 

And  turns  it  by  degrees  to  the  soul's  essence, 

Till  all  be  made  immortal.      But,  when  lust  .   .   . 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  231 

graphs  constructed  on  the  blank-verse  model.  At  any 
rate,  he  returns  at  once  to  "  blanks "  when  the  Spirit 
begins  a  serious  tirade  in  description  of  Comus  and  his 
rout,  and  gives  one  of  the  longest  and  finest  stretches  of 
it  that  we  have  yet  had.  The  type  is  here  not  cumulative 
merely,  but  thoroughly  interwoven,  with  plentiful  diversities 
of  redundance,  trisyllables,  and  the  like.  The  last-named 
lubricant,  too,  appears  in  the  otherwise  rather  stiffened 
verse  of  the  Elder  Brother's  speech,  inspirited  as  usual 
by  touches  of  passion,  as  in — 

And  earth's  base  built  on  stubjble.      But  come,  |  let's  on 
But  for  that  damned  Magi|cian,  let  him  |  be  girt 
Harpies  and  Hydras,  or  all  the  monstrous  forms, 

in  each  of  which  I  do  not  blink,  but  invite  attention  to 
the  presence  of  the  trisyllable  at  a  caesura.1  Note  too 

the  broken  Alexandrine — 

i 

As  to  make  this  relation  ? 

Care  and  utmost  shifts, 

which,  as  an  Alexandrine,  I  defy  any  one  who  goes  about 
to  break. 

In  line  633  we  have  one  of  those  experiments — almost 
inevitable  when  experiment  is  once  tried — which  are  not 
so  successful  as  others — 

Bore  a  bright  golden  flower,  but  not  j  in  this  soil. 

As  in  other  instances,  some  people,  I  believe,  manage 
to  persuade  themselves  that  this  is  harmony.2  I  cannot 
be  quite  so  complaisant.  You  cannot  get  "  flower,  but " 
into  one  foot  of  any  kind  without  extreme  jumbling  and 
cacophony  ;  and  if  you  make  the  fifth  foot  "  in  this  soil," 
you  are  burdened  with  a  redundant  syllable  of  much  too 

1  V.  sup.  p.  53. 

2  It  is  also  commonly  set  down  as  a  "  Fletcherism."     Milton  was  un- 
doubtedly much  influenced  by  more  than  one  of  the  Fletcher  family,  but  I 
cannot  think  this  awkward  end-stumble  one  of  the  happiest  instances.      V.  inf. 
on  B.  and  F.  themselves. 


232     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

great  weight  and  bulk,  making  a  sort  of  spondaic  ending,1 
which  contrasts  most  unfortunately  with  the  really  and 
accurately  spondaic  ending  of  the  very  next  line — 

Unknown  and  like  esteemed ;  and  the  dull  swain. 

But  though  I  am  sure  that  there  is  something  wrong  in  a 
prosodic  system  which  fails  to  justify,  much  more  in 
one  which  condemns,  a  beautiful  line,  I  think  it  absurd 
that  any  system  should  be  called  upon  to  beautify  an 
ugly  one  ;  and,  further,  I  should  regard  it  as  strange  if 
Milton,  at  the  early  period  of  his  career  especially,  made 
no  ugly  ones.  I  think  he  has  made  one  here. 

The  anapaestic  last  foot  of  662,  on  the  other  hand — 

Root-bound,  that  fled  Apollo. 

Lady,  Fool,  |  do  not  boast, 

is  thoroughly  well  in  place;  and  723  offers  a  pretty 
puzzle  for  prudish  prosodists — 

The  All-giver  would  be  unthanked,  would  be  unpraised. 

We  scan  it,  of  course,  as  it  is  printed,  and  make  a  beautiful 
line  of  it,  as  suitable  to  Comus'  rapid  and  fantastic  sophistry 
as  anything  could  be.  They,  I  suppose,  make  it — 

Th'  All-giver  'd  be  unthanked,  would  be  unpraised, 
or 

Th'  All-giver  would  b'  unthanked,  would  be  unpraised — 

where  either  alternative,  it  may  be  observed,  is  forced  in 
one  case  to  break  the  rule  which  it  enforces  in  the  other, 
and  "  b'  unpraised  "  has  still  to  be  provided  for. 
So  also  the  splendid  Alexandrine — 

The  sea  unfraught  would  swell,  and  the  unsought  diamonds, 

must  become  a  mere  jumble  of  words,  utterly  unworthy 
of  one  of  the  finest  concerted  pieces  in  the  medium  that 
had  yet  been  written.  The  more  sober  structure  of  the 
Lady's  stately  answer  contrasts  well  with  this  "gay 

1    See  the  actual  ending,  that  is  to  say.     The  last  foot  is,  of  course,  if  any- 
thing, an  antibacchic  or  a  very  clumsy  amphibrach.     I  do  not  want  either. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  233 

rhetoric,"  as  she  calls  it ;  yet  there  is,  after  the  famous 
"  Crams,  and  blasphemes  his  Feeder,"  another  ebullition 
of  contemptuous  indignation,  like  the 

Fool !  do  not  boast, 
above,  in 

Shall  |  I  go  on  ? 

And  then  before  the  long  lyric  Act  (as  we  may 
almost  call  it)  which  closes  the  Masque,  and  is  its  most 
Masquish  part,  the  blank  verse  appropriately  ceases 
with  the  admirable  description  of  Sabrina's  history, 
haunts,  and  habits,  which  is  almost  more  epic  than 
dramatic. 

In  a  general  estimate  of  the  blank  verse  of  Comus  we 
must,  of  course,  take  the  dramatic  form  into  consideration  ; 
but  we  need  not  allow  too  much  for  it.  In  the  first  place, 
Milton  had  practically  (for  Surrey,  Gascoigne,  etc.,  may 
be  left  out  of  the  question)  none  but  dramatic  models 
before  him,  even  if  he  had  been  minded  to  write  plain 
narrative.  In  the  second,  he  has  in  the  piece  itself  little 
occasion  (and  when  he  has  it  he  does  not  avail  himself 
of  it)  for  the  jointed  fabric  of  blank -verse  conversation, 
which,  as  we  have  seen,  was  to  Shakespeare  so  great  a 
school  for  ease  and  variety  of  verse- making,  without 
really  deserting  the  five -foot  norm.  Milton  evidently 
affects  and  prefers  tirades}  Of  the  six  or  seven  hundred 
lines  of  blank  verse  in  the  piece,  single  speeches  occupy 
92,  25,  60,  27,  26,  22,  57,  67,  24,  41,  24,  46,  44,  and 
48.  The  shorter  speeches  do  not  amount  to  a  hundred 
lines  together,  and,  putting  the  exercises  in  stichomythia 
aside,  not  to  a  score.  Moreover,  though  Milton  avails 
himself  of  the  Alexandrine  once  or  twice  certainly,  and  I 
think  oftener,  he  scarcely  ever  tries  the  imperfect  verse — 
the  verse -fragment — which  dramatic  "blanks"  invite, 
which  Shakespeare  managed  so  admirably,  and  which  his 
successors  mismanaged  so  abominably.  His  classical 

1  It  may  be  just  as  well  to  say  that  throughout  I  use  this  word,  not  in 
its  late  and  limited  sense,  but  in  the  origin  alone  of  a  long  batch  of  uninter- 
rupted verse,  whether  epic  or  dramatic. 


234     LATER  JACOBEAN  &•  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

models  no  doubt  influenced  him  here,  just  as  in  Paradise 
Lost  itself  Virgil  made  him  less  precise. 

On  the  whole,  therefore,  there  is  not  much  in  Comus, 
outside  the  lyrics,  which  calls  for  a  stamp  of  verse  not 
equally  available  for  pure  narrative,  and  for  the  actual 
speeches  with  which  narrative  is  usually  diversified ;  and 
it  could  directly  serve  as  a  school  and  exercising  ground 
for  narrative  blank  verse  itself. 

The  scholar  certainly  shows  himself  no  dunce,  and 
the  recruit  has  left  the  awkward  squad  a  very  long  way 
behind.  Complete  ease  of  versification  he  has  indeed  not 
quite  attained  ;  it  is  doubtful  whether  he  ever  attained 
this,  or  whether  he  wished  to  attain  it.  That  marvellous, 
billowy  flow  of  verse  on  which  Shakespeare  floats  us, 
with  an  occasional  break  or  ripple,  but  mostly  "  too  full 
for  noise  or  foam,"  is  not  what  Milton  aims  at.  His 
verses  do  not  float :  they  march,  and  march  magnificently, 
quickening  and  slackening,  altering  formation  slightly, 
but  always  with  more  touch  of  mechanism  in  them  than 
we  find  in  Shakespeare,  with  more  of  the  earth,  and  less 
of  the  wind  and  the  water,  if  with  hardly  less  of  the  fire, 
in  their  composition. 

He  has  found  many,  if  not  most,  of  the  tricks  and 
easements  of  the  process — the  redundant  syllable,  the 
trisyllabic  foot,  the  Alexandrine ;  and  he  makes  great 
use  of  the  full  stop  in  middle  line.  But  his  use  of  the 
pause  has  not  yet  thoroughly  perfected  itself;  and  what 
is  more  remarkable,  he  has  not  yet  made  any  fast  grip  of 
the  instrument  which  afterwards  he  was  to  employ  with 
such  astonishing  effect — the  development  of  the  verse- 
paragraph.  He  has  fine  periods,  but  his  working  up  of 
them  into  paragraphs  is  very  uncertain  :  it  might  almost 
seem  as  if  he  did  not  attempt  it  much.  Even  the  opening 
passage  has  not  the  unmistakable  paragraph  form  which 
one  would  expect ;  and  elsewhere  the  nearest  approach 
is  Comus's  aside  before  addressing  the  Lady.  But  he 
has  the  period — a  possession  on  which  that  of  the 
paragraph  must  certainly  follow — in  twenty  fine  passages, 
some  of  which  have  been  indicated  above.  And  he  has 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  235 

an  individual  line  which  is  already  fit  for  almost  anything, 
whether  it  tries  unusual  cadences,  or  contents  itself  with 
varying  the  usual  from 

In  regions  mild  of  calm  and  serene  air 
to 

Commended  her  fair  innocence  to  the  flood, 

and  a  hundred  magnificent  prosodic  phrases  or  clauses 
within  the  lines.  But  when  we  compare  the  blank  verse 
with  the  lyrics  we  see  at  once  that  absolute  mastery  has 
not  been  reached  in  the  one  as  in  the  other.  The  ipsa 
mollities  of  Sir  Henry  Wotton's  letter  was  surely  never 
so  justified  in  any  of  the  commendatory  epistles,  then  too 
frequent,  as  here,  from 

The  star  that  bids  the  shepherd  fold 

to  the  incomparable  close,  right  on  from  "  Sabrina  Fair  " 
to  the  Spirit's  self- dismissal.  Nobody  could  improve 
these.  We  feel  that  the  blank  verse,  admirable  as  it  is, 
and  at  times  consummate,  is  susceptible  of  improvement, 
here  and  there,  and  as  a  whole. 

It  would  be  of  the  first  interest  if  we  had  any  record  Paradise  Lost. 
of  the  reflections  of  persons  who,  familiar  with  the  volumes 
of  1637  and  1645,  found,  in  one  of  the  earliest  issues  of 
Paradise  Lost  twenty  years  and  more  after  the  latter  of 
these  volumes,  the  following  pronouncement  which,  well 
known  as  it  ought  to  be,  must  find  a  place  here  because 
of  its  importance,  and  of  the  fact  that  it  does  not  invari- 
ably appear  in  modern  editions. 

THE  VERSE 

The  measure  is  English  heroic  verse  without  rime,  as  that  of 
Homer  in  Greek,  and  of  Virgil  in  Latin — rime  being  no  neces- 
sary adjunct  or  true  ornament  of  poem  or  good  verse,  in  longer 
works  especially,  but  the  invention  of  a  barbarous  age,  to  set  off 
wretched  matter  and  lame  metre ;  graced  indeed  since  by  the 
use  of  some  famous  modern  poets,  carried  away  by  custom,  but 
much  to  their  own  vexation,  hindrance,  and  constraint  to 
express  many  things  otherwise,  and  for  the  most  part  worse, 


236     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

than  else  they  would  have  expressed  them.  Not  without  cause 
therefore  some  both  Italian  and  Spanish  poets  of  prime  note 
have  rejected  rime  both  in  longer  and  shorter  works,  as  have 
also  long  since  our  best  English  tragedies,  as  a  thing  of  itself, 
to  all  judicious  ears,  trivial  and  of  no  true  musical  delight ; 
which  consists  only  in  apt  numbers,  fit  quantity  of  syllables,  and 
the  sense  variously  drawn  out  from  one  verse  into  another,  not 
in  the  jingling  sound  of  like  endings — a  fault  avoided  by  the 
learned  ancients  both  in  poetry  and  all  good  oratory.  This 
neglect  then  of  rime  so  little  is  to  be  taken  for  a  defect,  though 
it  may  seem  so  perhaps  to  vulgar  readers,  that  it  rather  is  to  be 
esteemed  an  example  set,  the  first  in  English,  of  ancient  liberty 
recovered  to  heroic  poem  from  the  troublesome  and  modern 
bondage  of  riming. 

The  abjura-  That  is  to  say,  the  man  who  thirty  years  earlier  had 

issued,  and  who  eight  years  later  than  that  had  reissued, 
work  by  far  the  larger  part  of  which  had  been  in  rhyme, 
and  who — for  the  moment  let  us  put  it  in  no  stronger 
fashion — had  certainly  shown  himself  not  unapt  therein, 
now  affected  contempt  and  disgust  at  the  very  idea  of 
rhyming.  Nobody,  so  far  as  we  know,  made  any 
observations  on  this  anomaly  ; l  the  age  was,  in  fact,  very 
little  interested  in  prosodic  questions  as  such  ;  and  it  is 
noteworthy  that  Dryden,  its  literary  embodiment,  a  great 
practical  prosodist  himself  and  a  fertile  critic,  hardly  deals 
with  them  at  all,  though  he  tells  us  that  he  thought  of  doing 
so.  And  the  thing  still  remains  odd  ;  though  we  can  find 
quite  as  much  explanation  of  it  as  may  reasonably  be 
demanded,  especially  when  we  remember  the  partial 
relapse  into  the  flouted  form  which  Samson  shows.  It 
is  known  that  the  insertion  of  the  paragraph  was  an  after- 
thought ;  and  that  Milton  was  not  in  the  best  of  tempers 
at  having  to  write  it,  is  pretty  evident.  He  was  very 
often  not  in  the  best  of  tempers  :  but  his  crabbedness  was 
probably,  in  this  instance,  not  due  merely  to  impatience 
of  a  kind  of  apologia. 

He  had  much  earlier,  in  certain  famous  expressions  of 
his   prose   work,   manifested   a   violent   antipathy   to   the 

1  Marvell's  well-known  jibe  at  "  the  pack-horse  and  his  bells  "  does  not 
constitute  such  an  observation. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  237 

"  vulgar  amorists,"  the  "  vain  and  amatorious  "  poets,  of  his 
own  and  the  preceding  generation.  Now  to  these  poets  and 
in  these  poems,  especially  to  and  in  those  of  his  own  genera- 
tion, rhyme  had  been  the  most  favourite  weapon,  and  the 
instrument  not  merely  of  the  most  exquisite  successes, 
but  of  some  exploits  which  were  not  quite  exquisite 
and  not  at  all  successful.  Since  I  have  made  a  rather 
close  study  of  these  contemporaries  —  more  especially 
from  the  prosodic  point  of  view  —  it  has  been  very 
strongly  borne  in  upon  me  that  Milton  must  have  particu- 
larly disliked  the  enjambed  and  deliquescent  couplet,  of 
which  Chamberlayne's  Pharonnida  is  the  longest  and  best 
example,  but  which  had  been  becoming  more  and  more 
frequent  since  the  days  of  Browne.  The  very  instinct 
which  had  made  him  attempt  and  achieve  a  triumph  of 
irregular  rhyme,  fully  valued  and  allowed  for,  in  Lycidas, 
would  have  made  him  shrink  from  this  apparently  slovenly 
flux  of  rhyming  lines,  in  a  large  number  of  which  the 
rhyme  seems  to  be  totally  superfluous  except  to  mark 
line-ends  which  are  no  ends  at  all,  and  to  provide  what 
his  severe  musical  taste  would  probably  have  thought  a 
mere  strumming  accompaniment  The  Lycidas-form 
itself  would  have  been  clearly  out  of  place  in  a  long 
narrative  ;  and  the  stopped  couplet  which  was  just  coming 
in  was  a  little  later  than  Milton,  to  speak  from  a  true 
historical  inwardness.1  Nor  would  it  have  allowed — 
what  we  see  from  his  very  words,  and  could  have  seen 
without  them  from  his  earlier  practice,  he  was  fondest  of 
—his  own  mastery  of  the  "  sense  variously  drawn  out 
from  one  line  to  another."  Blank  verse  would  do  this  ; 
and  he  must  by  this  time  have  been  far  too  conscious  of 
his  skill  (even  if  it  had  been  the  Miltonic  way  ever  to 
have  any  doubts  on  this  head)  to  fear  that  he  could  not 
give  harmony  enough  by  rhythm  without  rhyme.  Lastly, 
there  was  the  charm  for  such  a  nature — and  for  all 
natures  that  have  any  tincture  of  nobleness  in  them — 
of  "  things  unadventured  yet."  And  so  he  launches  the 
ship  of  blank  verse  into  the  sea,  as  yet,  in  fact,  unsailed 

1  See  the  chapters  on  the  couplet. 


238     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

by  it,  with  no  guide  but  his  own  soul,  and  no  chart  but 
Shakespeare's  practice. 

To  go  through  the  ten  thousand  lines  of  Paradise  Lost 
exactly  as  we  went  through  the  six  or  seven  hundred  of 
Comus  would  be  very  tedious,  and  it  would  answer  no 
good  purpose  for  the  reader,  though  the  writer  was  bound 
to  do  and  has  done  it.  There,  the  prosodist  was  slightly 
uncertain  of  his  instrument  ;  here,  he  is  fingering  it  on 
definite  principles  from  first  to  last.  There  is,  of  course, 
considerable  difference  of  opinion  as  to  what  those 
principles  are  ;  and  before  long  we  may  have  to  put  the 
gloves  on,  and  even  to  be  prepared  for  other  people 
Examination  taking  them  off.  But  for  the  present  we  may  pursue 
ie  verse.  usual  method  of  dispassionate  examination  of  the 


phenomena,  usual  and  exceptional,  before  endeavouring 
to  draw  inferences  from  them.  As  very  great  importance 
has  been  assigned  to  the  actual  printed  text,  I  have 
thought  it  well  to  read  it  throughout  for  this  purpose  in 
Professor  Masson's  certified  facsimile  of  the  first  edition  ;  l 
and  where  anything  turns  upon  it  I  shall  quote  this 
literatim. 

Apostropha-  The  first  thing  of  a  prosodic  kind  which  is  likely  to 
strike  the  intelligent  novice  is  the  constant  printed  elision 
of  the  definite  article,  and  the  substitution  of  an  apostrophe 
for  the  final  e  wherever  the  syllable  is  not  absolutely 
required  to  make  up  a  dissyllabic  foot,  thus  — 

Fast  by  th*  oracle  of  God  ; 

but  in  other  places  "  th'  upright,"  "  th'  infernal,"  "  th' 
Eternal,"  "  th'  Aonian."  He  will  further  observe  that 
apostrophation  is  not  confined  to  this  —  that  "  Heav'nly  " 
and  "  Heav'n  "  occur  regularly,  and  that  some  words  are 
syncopated,  without  even  an  apostrophe,  from  the  forms 
he  knows  best  ("  adventrous  ").  At  the  same  time,  he 
will,  or  should,  remark  that  not  merely  are  two  syllables 
in  words  like  "  disobedience,"  "  Aonian,"  allowed  to  count 
as  one  often,  but  that  in  others  where  there  is  not  the 

1  London,  1877. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  239 

same  liaison — "  Siloa's  brook,"  "  Tempestuous  fire  " — no 
syncopation  is  typographically  indicated.1 

Passing    from    these    details,    if    he    reads     the    first 
paragraph  he  will  find — 

(1)  That    the    lines   are   very   regularly  decasyllabic, 
exhibiting  no  redundant  syllable  at  the  end,  and  nothing 
that  requires  the  supposition  of  such  an  one  at  the  caesura. 

(2)  That    in    consequence    of   the    above-mentioned 
fashions   of   spelling,  there   are   no  even   apparently  tri- 
syllabic  feet   except   those  due   to   the   juxtaposition   of 
vowels    as    above    indicated,   and    one    where    the   word 
"  Spirit "  occurs. 

(3)  That  the  sense  is  "variously  drawn  out  from  one 
verse  to  another  "  after  the  most  artful  fashion,  and  that 
thus,  by  "verse    periods,"   there    is    fashioned    a  "verse 
paragraph,"  which,  according  to  choice,  may  be  extended 
to  the  whole  forty-six  lines  as  printed  in  the  original,  or 
broken  at  pleasure  into  a  minor  paragraph  and  a  kind 
of  coda. 

1  It  may  be  well  to  give  the  first  paragraph  in  Professor  Massorrs  own 
text,  for  comparison  : — 

Of  Man's  first  disobedience,  and  the  fruit 

Of  that  forbidden  tree  whose  mortal  taste 

Brought  death  into  the  World,  and  all  our  woe, 

With  loss  of  Eden,  till  one  greater  Man 

Restore  us,  and  regain  the  blissful  seat, 

Sing,  Heavenly  Muse,  that,  on  the  secret  top 

Of  Oreb,  or  of  Sinai,  didst  inspire 

That  shepherd  who  first  taught  the  chosen  seed 

In  the  beginning  how  the  heavens  and  earth 

Rose  out  of  Chaos  :  or,  if  Sion  hill 

Delight  thee  more,  and  Siloa's  brook  that  flowed 

Fast  by  the  oracle  of  God,  I  thence 

Invoke  thy  aid  to  my  adventrous  song, 

That  with  no  middle  flight  intends  to  soar 

Above  the  Aonian  mount,  while  it  pursues 

Things  unattempted  yet  in  prose  or  rhyme. 

And  chiefly  Thou,  O  Spirit,  that  dost  prefer 

Before  all  temples  the  upright  heart  and  pure, 

Instruct  me,  for  Thou  know'st ;  Thou  from  the  first 

Wast  present,  and,  with  mighty  wings  outspread, 

Dove-like  sat'st  brooding  on  the  vast  Abyss, 

And  mad'st  it  pregnant :  what  in  me  is  dark 

Illumine,  what  is  low  raise  and  support ; 

That,  to  the  highth  of  this  great  argument, 

I  may  assert  Eternal  Providence, 

And  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men. 


240     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  fr  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

(4)  That  the  main  instrument  of  this  arrangement  is 
the  manipulation  of  the  pause,  which  in  the  first  six 
lines  is  respectively  in  the  middle  of  the  fourth  foot,  at 
the  end  of  the  third  (twice),  in  the  middle  of  the  third, 
in  the  middle  of  the  second,  and  at  the  end  of  it ;  while 
in  the  seventh  there  are  two  pauses,  of  equal  value,  at  the 
middle  of  the  second  and  of  the  fourth.  In  not  a  few 
subsequent  lines  he  will  fail  to  discover  any  pause  at  all  ; 
and  my  ear  would  not  quarrel  with  his  if  he  found 
practically  none  in  the  last  three  lines  running  except  at 
their  ends.  Yet,  for  all  this  variety,  he  will  find  that, 
various  as  is  the  cadence,  it  has  not  the  range  or  the 
flexibility  of  Shakespeare's  greatest  blank-verse  passages, 
chiefly  owing  to  the  closer  normality  of  the  lines,  and  to 
an  apparent  shyness  of  trisyllabic  feet.  That  this  shyness 
is  always  more  apparent  than  real  he  may  or  may  not 
be  in  doubt. 

The  continued  and  careful  examination  of  the  First 
Book  will  make  considerable  additions  to  this  stock  of 
observations,  and  will  perhaps  introduce  some  important 
modifications  in  it.  Two  hasty  generalisations — that 
Milton  always  inclines  to  the  pronunciation  of  "  Spirit " 
as  "  Spir't "  or  "  Sprite,"  and  that  he  invariably  makes 
"Heav'n"  a  monosyllable1 — will  be  corrected  by  line  101  — 

Innumerable  force  of  Spijrits  armed 

(unless  anybody  be  bold  enough,  and  too  bold,  so  as  to 
scan  "  Sprites  armed  "),  and  line  297 — 

On  Heajven's  ajzure  ;  and  the  torrid  clime 

(unless,  again,  the  same  person  proposes  "  Heav'n's     azur|e 
and  |  " — they  do  things  nearly  as  surprising). 

He  will  further  observe  certain  matters  which  interfere 
with  similar  generalisations  of  another  kind.  From  the 
frequent  crasis — on  the  strict  decasyllabic  system  —  of 
adjacent  vowels,  he  may  have  thought  "  Siloa's  brook " 
in  line  1 1  meant  to  be  scanned  "  Sylwa's  brook."  But 
he  will  find  that  in  "  th'  Aonian  mount "  he  will  have  to 

1  Cf.  sup,  on  Gascoigne,  and  inf.  on  Mitford. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  241 

give  up  his  theory,  or  else  value  "  the "  fully  ;  and  that 
many  other  juxtaposed  vowels  are  fully  valued  in  similar 
names,  "  Peor,"  "  Baalim,"  etc.  It  is  at  least  possible 
that  his  ear  will  revolt  at  the  spoiling  of  such  a  line  as 

Of  glojry  obscured ;  |  as  when  the  Sun  new  ris'n 

by  the  ugliness  of  "  Glor  |  yobscured,"  and  at  "  glory 
extinct "  as  "  glor  yextinct."  He  may  kick,  too,  at 
being  told  to  suppress  not  merely  the  weak  e,  but  a 
strong  vowel  like  o  in 

Whom  reason  hath  equalled, 

and  even  doubt  whether  Milton  regarded  the  e  itself 
before  an  r  as  negligible  when  he  reads — 

Whom  thunder  hath  made  greater, 

as  well  as  whether  he  really  meant  to  call  "  Emperor " 
"  Emp'ror,"  on  the  modern  principle  of  "  guv'nor "  for 
"  governor." 

Should  he  indeed  not  be  a  novice,  and  have  some 
acquaintance  with  the  printed  books  of  the  period,  he 
will,  or  may,  from  the  first  doubt  whether  any  particular 
importance  is  to  be  attached  to  the  typographical  elision 
of  "  th' "  ;  but  here  he  may,  if  not  so  acquainted,  be  left 
to  his  mistake  for  a  time.  Let  him,  suspending  this,  go 
on  -to  Book  II.  Here  he  will  find  some  really  remark- 
able lines,  such  as  123 — 

Ominous  |  conjecture  on  the  whole  success, 

and  he  will  say  rashly,  "  Well !  this  settles  the  question 
as  to  trisyllabic  feet !  They  certainly  will  not  tell  me 
that  Milton — a  gentleman,  a  scholar,  and  a  master  of 
harmonies,  pronounced  this  word  '  om'nous  '  when  it  is 
not  even  spelt  so."  Let  him  wait.  He  may  note  the 
curious  slipped  rhyme  of  "light"  and  "flight"  at  220- 
221,  and  certainly  should  note  the  undoubted  full  value 
of  "  Michael "  in  294.  But  he  will  probably  think  123 
absolutely  settled  by  302 — 

A  pillar  of  state  ;  deep  on  his  front  engraven, 
VOL.  II  R 


242     LATER  JACOBEAN  &>  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

and  313 — 

Princes  of  Hell  ?  for  so  the  popular  vote. 

Let  him  wait  again.     Line  412 — 

Through  the  strict  sentries  and  stations  thick, 

should  have  some  interest  for  him,  and  if  he  is  disposed 
to  attach  real  importance  to  printing  11.  421-422 — 

Pondering  the  danger  with  deep  thoughts,  and  each 
In  other's  count'nance  read  his  own  dismay, 

will  have  more  ;  for  if  "  count'nance "  is  so  of  prosodic 
malice  prepense,  why  not  "  pond'ring  "  ?  But  perhaps 
1.  450  will  give  him  most  to  think  over.  This  runs — 

Me  from  attempting.     Wherefore  do  I  assume ; 

and  to  it  we  may  return.  He  will  admire  Milton's 
sleight  (or  rather  weight)  of  prosodic  manipulation  in 

Rocks,  caves,  lakes,  fens,  bogs,  dens,  and  shades  of  death, 

though  he  may  think  the  internal  rhyme  of  "  dens  "  and 
"fens"  an  unlucky  accident.  He  should  observe  665 — 

With  Lapland  witches,  while  the  labouring  moon 
(not  "lab'ring"),  and  68 1  — 

Whence  and  what  art  thou,  execrable  shape  ? 

for  the  full  value  of  "  execrable."  Moreover,  he  will  find 
"Spi|rit"  once  more  in  956 — 

Or  Spi|rit  of  the  nethermost  Abyss. 

The  places  of  Book  III.  shall  be  indicated  with  less 
comment ;  indeed,  I  am  giving  but  a  few  of  the  hundreds 
that  I  have  noted  and  ready  for  use.  But  I  will  specify 
line  3 — 

May  I  express  |  thee  unblamed  ?  |  since  God  is  light 

(cf.  Chaucer's  "in  thalight,"  and  vol.  i.  p.  173)  ;  line  5  — 

Bright  ef[fluence  of  |  bright  essence  increate ; 
line  36 — 

And  Ti  |  resias  |  and  Phineus,  prophets  old ; 
line  108 — 

When  Will  and  Reason  (Reason  also  is  Choice), 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  243 

where  one  "  Reason "  must  be  dissyllabic,  and  both  may 
be,  with  an  anapaestic  ending,  though  there  also  is 
choice  of  jamming  these  very  words  into  "  also's."  And 
let  there  be  added  no,  "justjly  accuse  ";  120, 
"sha|dow  of  fate";  131-132,  "the  other,"  printed  in  full 
twice,  in  the  one  case  trisyllabic  or  slurred,  in  the  other 
full  -  valued  ;  195,  "Conscience"  (in  Comus  "Con-sci- 
ence"); 198,  "sufferance,"  not  "  suff ranee "  ;  461, 
"Spirits,"  dissyllabic;  503,  "Heaven"  printed  with  the 
e,  though  the  syllable  is  not  wanted.  In  586  a  really 
questionable  line  appears — 

Shoots  invisible  virtue  even  to  the  deep, 

which  had  better  be  reserved  ;  "  Uriel,"  a  trisyllable  in 
648,  and  a  trisyllabic  foot,  or  else  a  dissyllable,  in  664  ; 
with  two  reseruanda^  in  728 — 

Timely  hvterposes,  and,  her  monthly  round, 
and  731  — 

Hence  fills  and  empties,  to  enlighten  the  Earth. 

In  the  Fourth  Book,  noticing  the  fact  that  in  1.  5 — 
Woe  to  the  inhabitants  on  earth;  that  now, 

the  article  is  not  apostrophated,  and  allowing  in  utmost 
fairness  that  this  may  have  something  to  do  with  the 
italic  type,  one  observes  that  for  a  long  time  the  metre 
is  unusually  "regular."  But  in  1.  371  there  occurs  what 
some  would  take  as  an  elision  of  such  an  exceptional 
kind  that  we  must  return  to  it — 

Long  to  continue,  and  this  |  high  seat,  your  Heaven ; 

while  in  5  94  a  quantification,  happily  indisputable,  appears 
which  throws  light  on  other  disputed  ones — 

Diurnal,  or  this  less  volubil  earth. 


1  When  I  speak  of  such  "  reservation  "  and  "return"  I  do  not  necessarily 
mean  that  the  quotations  will  be  separately  discussed,  but  that  they  will  form 
the  basis  of  the  general  remarks  to  be  made  later. 


244     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

In   720-721    occurs  that  collision  of  final  and  initial 
spondees — 

Thus  at  their  shady  lodge  arrived  both  stood, 
Both  turned,  and  under  open  sky  adored, 

which  so  did  disturb  the  greatest  of  all  accentualists,  Dr. 
Johnson  and  Dr.  Guest,  and  which  so  rejoices  all  foot- 
men, from  the  admirable  selection  of  the  foot  for  the  sense. 
806  is  a  difficult  line  on  both  schemes,  but  much 
more  difficult  on  one  than  on  another — 

Th'  animal  spirits  that  from  pure  blood  arise, 

where,  it  may  be  observed,  apostrophation,  if  metrically 
valid,  involves  an  excessively  ugly  (if  even  possible)  sound 
of  "  thanimal  |  spirits,  "  while  "The  animal  spirits  |" 
is  perfectly  harmonious. 

There  is  hardly  anything  else  in  the  Book  that  needs 
notice  except  884 — 

Employed,  it  seems,  to  violate  sleep,  and  those, 

where  choice  is  free  between  the  scornful  appropriateness 
of  the  trisyllabic  "  violate "  and  the  jejune  vulgarity  of 
"  vi'late." 

L.  141  of  the  Fifth  is  noteworthy — 

Shot  para/el  to  the  earth  his  dewy  ray, 

where,  no  doubt,  the  devotees  of  "elision  before  pure  /" 
would  say  that  the  second  was  omitted  to  procure  it.  I 
very  much  doubt  Milton's  thus  taking  liberties  with  a 
Greek  word,  while  I  know  seventeenth-century  printers 
far  too  well  to  doubt  their  doing  so  ;  but  even  if  this 
liberty  be  conceded  there  remains  the  awkward  fact  that 
the  omission  makes  the  word  better  for  the  trisyllabic  "  Shot 
pajrajlel  to  "  ;  while  as  for  the  dissyllabic  "  par'lel,"  it  is  an 
ugliness  to  which  I  can  allow  no  redemption,  except  that 
it  provides  a  rhyme — otherwise  not  easy — for  Lodovick 
Carlell. 

342,    I    think,  shows    how  treacherous    a    thing    the 
apostrophe  is — 

Rough  or  smooth  rin'd,  or  bearded  husk,  or  shell  ; 

for  though  there  is  a  dialectic  form  "  rine,"  it  is  to  the 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  245 

last  degree  improbable  that  Milton  used  it,  while  "  husk  " 
and  "  shell "  point  imperatively  to  the  noun  "  rind." 
4 1  3  is  very  interesting — 

And  corporeal  to  incorporeal  turn. 

It  must  be  rather  a  choke-pear  for  the  "drumming 
decasyllabists,"  inasmuch  as  one  of  the  "  -reals  "  must  be 
syncopated  and  the  other  not.  For  my  own  part  I  have 
no  doubt  that  "  corporeal "  is  simply  misprinted  for 
"  corporal,"  which  in  the  parallel  passage  at  496  of  this 
very  Book  is  so  printed,  and  again  at  573.  This  is  a 
very  common  confusion,  and  occurs  in  Hamlet.  "  In- 
corpora/"  is  less  likely,  though  it  occurs  in  Raleigh. 
There  should  also  be  noted  563 — 

High  matter  thou  enjoinst  me,  O  prime  of  men, 

with  the  practical  disappearance  of  "  me,"  which  deca- 
syllabic scansion  requires  ;  and  perhaps  also  585  — 

Innumerable  before  th'  Almighty's  throne, 

"  for  a  purpose  to  be  hereafter  disclosed,"  as  the  projector 
said  in  the  Bubble  time,  and  indeed  sometimes  says,  not 
quite  totidem  verbis,  in  his  prospectuses  to-day. 

Book  Six — the  famous  one  of  the  celestial  battles, 
and,  however  often  one  has  read  it,  a  marvel  alike  for 
the  magnificence  of  its  serious  substance  and  the  utter 
wretchedness  of  the  comic  inset — has,  to  be  noted  pro- 
sodically,  few  things  in  number,  but  some  of  almost 
unsurpassed  importance.  The  differing  values  of  the 
-iel  and  -ael  terminations  in  archangelic  and  angelic 
names  are  really  of  great  moment — "  Michael,"  for 
instance,  having  actually  three  values,  Mljchalel,  Mi|chael, 
and  Mi|ch|ael.  But  the  great  places  of  the  Book  in 
prosodic  discussion  have  usually  been  1.  34 — 

Universal  reproach  far  worse  to  bear, 
and  still  more  866 — 

Burnt  after  them  to  the  bottomless  pit. 

These  also  must  be  reserved  for  the  present. 


246     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

In  the  original  edition,  as  Milton-students  know, 
there  are  only  ten  Books — Seven  and  Eight  and  Eleven 
and  Twelve  in  the  later  being  respectively  united  in  the 
earlier  as  Seven  and  Ten.  To  suit  this  difference  double 
references  will  be  given  where  necessary.  Of  minor 
matters  attention  may  be  drawn  to — VII.  15,  "tempring" 
without  apostrophe;  73,  "the  Empyrean"  with  valued 
"  the  "  ;  1 03,  a  similarly  valued  "  the  "  with  "  unapparent "  ; 
127,  "temperance"  with  the  e  neither  elided  nor  valued 
except  as  part  of  a  trisyllabic  foot — 

Her  temperance  over  appetite,  to  know  ; 

and    the  characteristic  but  very  differently  interpretable 

130— 

Wisdom  to  folly  as  nourishment  to  wind. 

More  vital  in  itself  is  236 — 

And  vital  virtue  infused  and  vital  warmth, 

of  which  more  anon  ;  and  still  more  390 — 
Display'd  the  op^n  firmament  of  Heaven, 

and  398 — 

And  let  the  fowl  be  multiply 'd  on  the  Earth. 

A  curious  double  omission  of  apostrophation  is  in  4 1 8 — 
Their  brood  as  numerous  hatch  from  th*  egg,  that  soon, 

and  either  a  complete  mistake  of  the  printer  or  a  death- 
blow to  "pop'lar"  in  488 — 

Hereafter  joined  in  her  popular  tribes. 

On  some  at  least  the  double  value  of  the  same  word 
in  the  following  distich  will  not  be  lost  (526,  527) — 

The  breath»of  life  ;  in  his  own  Image  he 
Created  thee,  in  the  Image  of  God, 

where  "  Image "  and  "  Image "  are  hardly  more  note- 
worthy than  the  other  double  testimony  simultaneously 
given,  that  Milton  did  not  in  the  least  think  "  elision  " 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  247 

necessary;   while  yet  another  double   in    533   and    534 
must  be  noted — 

Over  Fish  of  the  sea  and  Fowl  of  the  air 

And  every  living  thing  that  moves  on  the  Earth. 

The  remainder  of  the  Book  in  the  first  version — the 
Eighth  in  the  second — is  less  fertile;  but  it  has  in  936 
(VII.  299,  2nd  ed.)  one  of  Milton's  curious  ditrochaic  (or 
paeonic)  openings — 

To  the  Garden  of  Bliss  thy  seat  prepared, 

and  a  crux,  the  "  extrametrical "  syllable  in    1286  (649, 
2nd  ed.) — 

Thy  condescen.«0«,  and  shall  be  honoured  ever, 

which  also  must  stand  by. 

VIII.  (vulgo  IX.)  gives  another  example  of  "virtue" 
in  1 10 — 

Not  in  themselves  all  their  known  virtue  appears  ; 

and  further  noteworthy  lines  in  296 — 

For  he  who  tempts,  though  in  vain,  at  least  asperses, 

and  508 — 

Ammonian  Jove,  or  Capitoline,  was  seen, 
and  570 — 

What  thou  command's!,  and  right  thou  shouldst  be  obeyed. 

These,  and  especially  904 — 

The  sacred  fruit  forbidd'n  ?    Some  cursed  fraud, 

may  be  consulted  by  the  curious  ;  but,  above  all,  1082 — 

And  rapture  so  oft  beheld  ?     Those  heavenly  shapes. 

Does  anybody  really  believe  that  Milton  would  have  run 
the  risk  of  the  substitution  of 

And  rapture  soft  beheld  ? 

The  Tenth  Book  of  the  ordinary  arrangement — the 
Ninth  of  the  original — is  very  rich  in  prosodic  notanda. 
There  is  perhaps  more  than  a  fanciful  inference  to  be 


248     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  v I 

drawn  from  the  fact  that  while  1.  12  gives  us  one  of  the 
supposed  syncopations — 

For  still  they  knew,  and  ought  to  have  still  remembered, 

1.  22  gives  us  a  full-valued  Heaven  in  a  rather  remarkable 
place — 

From  Earth  arriv'd  at  Heaven  Gate,  displeased. 

There  are  various  retentions  of  the  Latin  accent — 45, 
"  impulse " ;  59,  "  colleague " ;  as  well  as  one  of  the 
instances  of  "  whether,"  monosyllabised  according  to  the 
common  theory,  which  also  requires  unusual  astringents 
in  86 — 

Of  high  collateral  glory  ;  him  Thrones  and  Powers  ; 

as  again  in  106 — 

Where  obvious  duty  erewhile  appeared  unsought. 
Note  also  (and  especially)  121  — 

So  dreadful  to  thee  ?     That  thou  art  naked  who  ; 
and  almost  more  especially  178 — 

And  dust  shalt  eat  all  the  days  of  thy  life, 

where  it  is  pretty  certain  that  Milton  meant  to  extend 
the  monosyllabic  emphasis  of  the  whole  line  to  "  the." 
A  very  noteworthy  line  is  198 — 

Because  thou  hast  hearkened  to  the  voice  of  thy  wife, 

where  the  dignity  of  the  first  phrase  of  judgment  will  be 
hopelessly  lost  if  we  read — 

Because  |  thou'st  hearjken'd  to  |  th'  voice  of  |  thy  wife, 

instead  of 

u  i  *i.      i.     ..  T.       if  kened  to  the  I  voice  of  I  thy  wife, 

Because     thou  hast  hear  \\  .  ,    '      '         ' 

1  (  kened  to  |  the  voice  j  of  thy  wife, 

which  latter  has  the  special  argument  in  its  favour  that 
Milton  finishes  scores  of  lines  by  parallel  trisyllables. 
And  if  anybody  says  that  apostrophation  could  not  be 
expected  before  "  voice,"  let  him  look  at  204 — 

Unbid,  and  thou  shalt  eat  th'  Herb  of  th'  Field. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  249 

The  spelling  of  "idkly"  in  236  is  here  mentioned 
out  of  fairness,  though  or  because  it  cuts  both  ways, 
as  perhaps  does  another  "  virtue "  in  372.  But  passing 
over  some  minor  points  (to  be  looked  up  by  whoso 
chooses)  in  467,  468  especially,  and  562,  we  come  to  a 
famous  Guest-choker  in  581 — 

Ophion,  with  Eurynome,  the  wide- 
Encroaching  Eve  perhaps, 

where  the  inextinguishable  wrath  of  the  excellent  Master 
of  Sidney  shows  to  what  extent  theory  will  blind  a 
learned  and  acute  intelligence,  at  once  to  beauty  and  the 
reason  of  beauty.  For  the  line  is  beautiful  ;  and  the 
partition  of  the  translation  of  "  Eurynome,"  besides  link- 
ing it  with  the  next,  excites  curiosity  to  know  how  the 
second  member  will  be  translated.  But  to  divide  a  word 
— even  a  hyphen-made  word — was  shocking ;  and  it 
shocked. 

To  some  ears,  at  least,  great  loss  of  beauty  would  be 
caused  by  the  omission  to  give  full  value  to  the  italicised 
syllables  in  720 — 

O  miserable  of  hap^y  !      Is  this  the  end  ; 

not  "th'  end,"  observe.    Observe,  too,  the  cadence  in  936 — 

Me,  me  only,  just  object  of  his  ire  ; 
and  1092 — 

Of  sorrow  unfeigned  and  humiliation  meek. 

There  is  less  later ;  but  in  XI.  34  note  in  connection  with 
the  last  line  quoted — 

And  propitiation  ;  all  his  works  on  me  ; 
while  in  559 — 

Fled  and  pursued  transverse  the  resonant  fugue, 

observe  what  an  infinite  loss  in  "suiting  the  sound  to 
the  sense "  will  come  from  substituting  "  res'nant "  for 
"resonant";  and  note  in  768  and  770  the  curious 
coincidence — more  than  curious  when  we  consider  what 


250     LATER  JACOBEAN  &>  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

an  ear  lay  hard  by  the  tongue  that  dictated  it,  not  wrote 
it— of 

Him  or  his  children,  e\vil,  he  may  |  be  sure, 
and 

And  he  the  future  e\tnl  shall  |  no  less. 

As  for  the  later  part  of  the  Book  (which  became  XII.), 
less  still  need,  for  our  purpose,  be  noted.  Those  who  are 
pursuing  the  inquiry  seriously  will  find,  among  others, 
11.  932  (41),  "bitu|minous  gurge";  935  (44),  "A  city 
and  town  |  whose  top";  953  (62)  "Ridic|ulous  and"; 
instances  of  "  glory,"  "  pillar,"  and  the  "  able  "  and  "  ably  " 
words;  and  so  on.  More  important  are  1131  (240) — 

Without  j  Media  | tor,  whose  high  office  now, 
and  1419  (518) — 

By  spiritual ;  to  themselves  appropriating. 

Paradise         Paradise  Regained  does  not  contribute  quite  in  pro- 
Regamed.  pOrtjonj  but  ft  has  some  noteworthy  lines.     Milton's  not 

very  frequent,  but  almost  always  specially  felicitous  use 

of  alliteration,  appears  in  I.  93 — 

The  ^fimpses  of  his  Father's  glory  shine  ; 

and  there  is  a  bold  pause,  the  conditions  of  which  may  be 
disputed,  in  140 — 

O'ershadow  her.     This  Man  born  and  now  grown  up ; 

while  the  famous  crux  of  "  bottomless  "  reappears  in  361 — 

With  them  from  bliss  to  the  bottomless  Deep. 

Here,  even  more  than  in  the  other,  though  I  do  not  think 
that  Milton  would  have  hesitated  to  scan  "  bottomless " 
as  an  amphibrach,  I  am  inclined  to  prefer  one  of  his 
beloved,  if  not  quite  wisely  beloved,  choriambic  syzygies 
(-ww-).  But  both  the  First  and  the  Second  Book 
chiefly  give  us  things  noted  before,  excepting  a  comple- 
mentary example  (II.  154)  of  choriamb  or  antispast  "as 
you  like  it" — 

Among  daughters  of  men  the  fairest  found  ; 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  251 

and  II.  267-269 — 

And  saw  the  ravens,  with  their  horny  beaks, 

Food  to  Elijah  bringing  even  and  morn — 

Though  ravenous,  taught  to  abstain  from  what  they  brought, 

where  it  is  most  important  to  observe  that  if  you  do  not 
give  "  ra-ven-ous "  the  full  syllabic  value,  which  is 
necessary  in  "  ravens,"  you  spoil  that  play  of  words  which 
Milton  undoubtedly,  however  oddly,  liked  as  much  as  he 
pretended  to  dislike  rhyme.  289  gives  us  "bottom" 
with  its  usual  accent ;  and  445  — 

Worthy  of  memorial)  canst  thou  not  remember, 

prompts  one  to  ask  whether,  if  Milton  preferred  the 
"  pure "  line,  he  would  not  have  written  "  worthy 
memorial,"  as  he  might  have  done,  to  get  rid  of  at  least 
one  superfluity. 

In  Book  III.  the  curious  different  valuations  of  "  glory  " 
in  the  different  places  within  four  lines,  117-120,  first 
invite  notice.  "Ignominy"  in  136 — 

But  condemnation,  ignominy  and  shame, 

may  suggest  different  constructions,  when  taken  with  the 
existence  of  "ignomy."  In  392  the  final  "battles  and 

leagues "  is  corroboratory  of  "  bottomless  deep,"  as  is 
"  idols  with  God  "  (432)  ;  and  400 — 

Thy  politic  maxims  or  that  cumbersome, 

may  seem  to  some  to  justify  Count  Smorltork. 
Book  IV.  gives  at  173 — 

The  abominable  terms,  impious  condition, 

one  of  the  most  difficult  of  Miltonic  lines  to  scan 
musically  on  any  system.  It  seems  to  me  best  as 
an  Alexandrine,  the  slow  weight  and  length  of  which 
would  fall  in  with  Our  Lord's  distinctly  mentioned 
"  disdain,"  and  the  purport  of  the  words  themselves. 

"Fountain    of    Light,"   at   the    end    of    289,  is   another 


252     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

argument  for  |  bottomless  pit  |  .  It  may  be  noted  that 
Milton  accumulates  redundant  endings  here,  as  he  hardly 
does  earlier ;  it  is  curious  how  this  licence  seems  to  be 
a  Eurynome,  or  "  wide  -  encroaching  "  temptation  ;  and 

the  very  last  words,  "  private  returned,"  clench  the  argu- 
ment for  "  bottomless  "  with  wwwrenched  accent. 
Samson  The  prosodic  interest  of  Samson  Agonistes  is  known 

Agomstes.  ^Q  ^Q  great  It  consists  partly  in  the  character  of  the 
diction,  which  is  the  stiffest  in  Milton,  and  the  most 
classicised ;  partly  in  the  blank  verse  ;  but  most  in  the 
elaborately  modulated  measures  of  the  choruses,  and  in 
the  fact  that  here  the  Dalila  of  Rhyme  does  actually 
triumph  over  her  Samson,  and  establishes  herself  in  his 
house  once  more  after  years  of  separation  and  obloquy. 
These  choruses  are  rather  grand  than  beautiful,  but  they 
all  lend  themselves  to  the  strictest  foot-scansion.1 

In  the  blanks  the  chief  things  noteworthy  are  yet 
further  experiments  of  the  same  character  as  the  chori- 
ambic  ending  which  we  have  seen  so  frequently  attempted 

1  Oct.,      Iamb.,  ("This,  this  |  is  he  |  ;  softly  |  awhile ; 
and  Troch.       \  Let  us  |  not  break  |  in  up  |  on  him. 

Dec.  O  change  |  beyond  |  report,  |  thought,  or  |  belief ! 

Alex.  See  how  j  he  lies  |  at  ran  |  dom,  care  |  lessly  diffused, 

Hexasyl.  With  languished  head  |  unpropt, 

Hexasyl.  hyperc.  As  one  |  with  hope  |  aban  |  doned, 

Hexasyl.  hyperc.  And  by  |  himself  |  given  ojver. 

Oct.  In  slajvish  hab|it,  ill-fit  |  ted  weeds  | 

Tetrasyl.  O'er-worn  |  and  soiled. 

Alex.  Or  do  |  my  eyes  j  misrepresent?  |  Can  this  j  be  he? 

Oct.  cat.  That  he|roic,  |  that  re|nowned, 

Dec.  Irre  |  sisti  |  ble  Sam  |  son  whom,  |  unarmed, 

Alex.  No  strength  |  of  man  |  or  fiercest  wild  |  beast  could  | 

withstand  ; 

Alex.  Who  tore  |  the  li|on  as  |  the  li|on  tears  |  the  kid  ; 

Dec.  Ran  on  |  embat|tled  ar|mies  clad  |  in  iron, 

Hexasyl.  And,  weaponless  |  himself,  | 

Alex.  Made  arms  |  ridi|culous,  |  useless  |  the  for|gery 

Dec.  Of  bra|zen  shield  |  and  spear,  |  the  ham|mered  cuirass, 

Dec.  Chalyb|ean-tem|pered  steel  |  and  frock  |  of  mail 

Hexasyl.  Ada  (mantel  an  proof: 

Hardly  anything  here  needs  remark,  except  the  use  made  of  the  old 
catalectic  octosyllable  beloved  from  Comus  days,  with  its  trochaic  cadence, 
and  that  of  half- Alexandrines  or  hexasyllables.  There  is  only  one  monometer, 
towards  the  centre  or  waist  of  the  scheme. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  253 

in  Paradise  Regained,  and  which  some  people  call  "  reversal 
of  stress." 1 

Instances  may  be  found  in  579 — 

Better  at  home  lie  bed-rid,  not  only  idle, 

which  no  system  makes  really  harmonious  ;  line  748 — 
Out !  out !  hyaena  :  these  are  thy  wonted  arts, 

which   hardly   any   system    but   ours   can    explain    satis- 
factorily ;  line  797 — 

No  better  way  I  saw  than  by  importuning, 
which  is  almost  certainly  an  Alexandrine ;  line  842 — 

Or  by  evasions  thy  crime  uncover'st  more, 

where     the     strict     decasyllabic     needs     the    impossible 
"  evasns  "  ;  line  868 — 

Private  respects  must  yield  with  grave  authority, 

an  Alexandrine   more   certain   than  ever ;  and   the  very 
curious  triplet  of  redundance  in  938-940 — 

If  in  my  flower  of  youth  and  strength,  when  all  men 
Loved,  honoured,  feared  me ;  thou  alone  could  hate  me, 
Thy  husband,  slight  me,  sell  me,  and  forego  me. 

If  these  are  not  experiments,  and  experiments  in  strict 
foot-system  with  equivalence  and  substitution,  I  do  not 
know  what  they  are,  unless  you  class  them  with  all  the 
other  things  reserved  and  most  of  those  noted  as 
"  anomalies,"  which  is  simply  confession  and  avoidance. 

Let  us  call  a  halt  now.  It  is  not  surprising  that 
certain  of  the  lines  quoted  from  Paradise  Regained, 
supplemented  as  they  are  by  many  others  also  cited  in 

1  I  have  ventured  below  to  image  forth  the  effect  produced  on  my  ear  and 
mind  by  accentual  scansion  with  the  aid  of  the  shunting-yard.  For  a  pendant 
as  to  this  (to  me  rather  absurd)  phrase  I  must  recur  to  the  tin  soldiers  beloved 
of  all  properly  constituted  children.  Can  any  one  fail  to  remember  how,  when 
one  had  carefully  arranged  them  in  a  row,  they  would,  at  a  touch  of  a  hasty 
sleeve  or  something  similar,  tumble  against  each  other  in  different  directions, 
and  refuse  to  "  dress  "  ?  This  is  just  what  the  "  reversed  stresses  "  do. 


254     LATER  JACOBEAN  &-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

Samson  Agonistes,  have  somewhat  disturbed  the  believers 
in  a  systematic  and  rigidly  observed  "  elision  "  in  Milton. 
Such  lines  in  Paradise  Regained  as 

And  all  the  flourishing  works  of  peace  destroy  (iii.  80), 

Whose  offspring  in  his  posterity  yet  serve  (iii.  375), 
and 

Thy  politic  maxims  or  that  cumbersome  (iii.  400), 

with  the  Samson  example  just  given,  are  clearly  not  recon- 
cilable with  the  limitations  sometimes  tabulated.  No 
wonder  that  a  candid  believer  should  admit  that  they  look 
as  if  this  theory  had  been  quite  discarded.  But  would  it  not 
be  more  reasonable  and  equally  fair  to  say  that  they  look 
as  if  such  a  theory  had  never  been  held,  or  had  been  held 
merely  as  a  stage  to  a  wider  one  ?  Remember  that  the 
simple  theory  of  trisyllabic  feet  is  equally  applicable  to 
both — that  it  makes  no  more  difficulty  with  the  one  than 
with  the  other,  and  sets  both  in  harmony.  Remember 
too  that  there  need  not  be  the  slightest  difficulty  in 
admitting  development  in  Milton's  use  of  trisyllabic  foot- 
emancipation,  to  some  progressive  extent,  from  the  gyves  of 
apostrophation  and  the  strict  iambic  heresy.  Remember, 
further,  that  even  in  Paradise  Lost  the  precisians  of 
elision  have  had  to  admit  exceptions  which  were  sure  to 
pullulate.  Remember,  finally,  how  they  advance  the 
exceedingly  double-edged  argument  that  in  Paradise 
Lost  the  exceptions  are  most  common  in  those  syllables 
which  experience  shows  to  be  oftenest  and  best  used  for 
trisyllabic  places.  And  join  to  the  remembrance  that 
what  must  have  been  before  him — the  trisyllabic  practice 
of  Shakespeare — is  absolutely  unlimited.  To  the  person 
who  will  keep  these  things  in  mind  it  should  be  super- 
fluous to  dwell  on  them. 

But  let  us  return  for  a  moment  to  the  actual  examina- 
tion of  Samson.  The  central  passage,  the  clou  for  the 
whole  study  of  the  play  as  far  as  its  apparent  anomalies 
go,  is  the  great  and  famous  one  at  the  opening  of  the 
Chorus  after  Harapha's  departure — 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  255 

Oh,  how  comely  it  is,  and  how  reviving, 
To  the  spirits  of  just  men  long  oppressed, 
When  God  into  the  hands  of  their  oppressor 
Puts  invincible  might. 

It  might  have  been  thought  that  this  passage  would 
speak  trumpet-tongued — that  anybody  possessed  of  any 
knowledge  of  Latin  would  see  that  Milton  was  imitating 
the  "  fantastical  dainty  metre  "  of  the  Catullian  hendeca- 
syllabic.  But  no !  Inversions  of  stress,  exchanges  of 
accustomed  rhythm  for  unaccustomed — all  sorts  of  tricks, 
as  fantastical,  but  not  as  dainty — seem  to  suggest  them- 
selves to  those  who  will  not  accept  the  plain  doctrine — 
the  same  yesterday,  to-day,  and  for  ever — of  English 
prosody,  since  English  was  English.  It  is  perfectly 
certain  that  Milton  is  playing  his  part  as  the  Abdiel  of 
the  classical-metre  craze.  I  would  give  something,  little 
as  I  care  for  biographical  details,  to  know  whether  he 
had  read  Campion — but  it  does  not  much  matter.  The 
note  on  the  verse  in  Paradise  Lostt  and  the  observation 
on  the  Pyrrha^  give  one  quite  sufficient  information. 
In  these  choruses  he  is  evidently  making  his  last  and 
boldest  experiment,  to  see  if  he  cannot  merely  enlarge 
but  change  the  bounds  of  English  metre.  It  is  the  way 
of  the  reformer.  He  fails  magnificently ;  but  he  fails. 
He  produces  some  exquisite  curiosities,  but  he  establishes 
no  precedent.  For  once  the  comic  verdict  has  no  absurdity 
in  it :  "  Not  guilty  ;  but  don't  do  it  again  !  " l 

The  other  most  remarkable  passage,  equally  famous 
and  equally  striking,  is  much  less  homogeneous  and  more 
questionable.  It  consists  of  the  opening  lines  of  the  Semi- 
chorus  triumph  over  the  destruction  of  the  Philistines — 

1  I  have  sometimes  thought  that  a  stanza  of  this  kind  may  have  struck 
him  as  worth  trying,  in  order  to  get  still  nearer  to  Latin  kinds  than  he  had 
done  in  Pyrrha.  I  do  not  know  whether  any  one  has  noticed  that  it  is  easy 
enough  to  English  Pyrrha  exactly — 

What  boy  elegant  with  many  a  rose  now  thee 

Courts,  while  perfumes  around  everywhere  drop  from  him  ? 

For  whom  bind'st  thou  thy  golden  locks, 

Pyrrha,  cool  in  a  grotto  ? 

But  it  is  very  ugly,  like  all  its  kind. 


256     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

While  their  hearts  were  jocund  and  sublime, 
Drunk  with  idolatry,  drunk  with  wine, 
And  fat  regorged  of  bulls  and  goats. 

Now,  here  there  is  nothing  like  the  almost  indisputable 
and  self- imposing  metrical  character  of  the  first  piece. 
Are  we  to  take  it  trochaically,  with  the  second  line  a  sort 
of  cabriole  or  somersault  of  that  dactyl  which  is  the 
natural  expansion  of  the  trochee  as  the  anapaest  is  of  the 
iamb,  but  subsiding  into  iambics  in  the  third  line  ?  After 
this  the  lines  continue  as  thus — 

Chaunting  their  idol,  and  preferring 
Before  our  living  Dread,  who  dwells 
In  Silo,  his  bright  sanctuary, 

and  so  forth,  soberly  enough. 

Or,  remembering  that  there  is  elsewhere  a  parallel  to 
the  first  line  in  1.  606 — 

O  that  torment  should  not  be  confined, 
are  we  to  take 

While  their  hearts  were  jocund  and  sublime 

as  an  imitation  on  Milton's  part  of  the  Chaucerian 
"  acephalous "  niner,  and  remembering  that  Milton  often 
plays  tricks  with  "  idolatry "  and  its  congeners,  scan  the 
next — 

Drunk  |  with  i|dola|try,  drunk  |  with  wine, 

so  that  there  will  be  no  real  or  important  divergence 
from  the  iambic  basis  throughout?  Either  way  is 
possible. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  if  we  take  the  second,  the 
appearance  of  the  two  acephalous  lines  (knowing,  as  we 
do,  that  Milton  knew  his  Chaucer  well,  and  knowing 
further,  as  we  do,  what  admirable  use  he  had  made  of 
the  acephalous  octosyllable)  is  very  interesting.  But 
whichever  we  take,  and  whatever  other  of  the  Samson 
oddments  we  add  to  these,  we  still  have,  in  both  and  in 
all,  a  further  document  of  Milton's  unconquerable  tendency 
to  experimentalise.  He  had  begun  with  the  anapaestic 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  257 

ending  in  Comus ;  he  continued  with  all  the  lines  which 
have  been  made  subjects  of  question  in  Paradise  Lost. 
He  widened  his  range  a  little — though  not,  I  think,  on 
any  new  principle — in  Paradise  Regained ;  and  in  Samson 
Agonistes  he  "  makes  the  jump,"  as  the  French  say,  into 
entirely  new  combinations.  But  let  it  be  observed  that 
here  also  he  keeps  his  singular  method.  The  earlier 
choruses,  and  parts  of  Samson's  own  speeches,  are  strictly 
iambic  in  basis,  though  irregular  in  length.  The  cases 
where  it  is  difficult  to  maintain  that  basis  are  very  few. 
The  cases  where  it  is  simply  out  of  the  question  are 
almost  limited  to  a  single  one.  Of  this  one  it  may 
perhaps  be  permissible  to  use  the  old  theological  caution 
(quite  in  Milton's  way)  as  to  the  death-repentance  of  the 
penitent  thief.  Milton  gives  it  that  none  may  despair  of 
new  possibilities  in  English  metre.  He  gives  no  more, 
that  none  may  presume  -on  reckless  and  hazardous 
experiment. 

But  we  must  return  again.  The  anomalies  which  we  Attempts  to 
have  been  surveying,  or  some  of  them,  have  struck  parent'56 
students  of  various  degrees  of  competence  and  intelligence  anomaly. 
from  very  early  times  ;  and  constant  efforts  have  been 
made  to  explain,  or  at  any  rate  to  "  regiment "  them. 
Most  of  these  efforts,  and  their  authors,  will  find  sufficient 
place  in  the  "  Prosodist "  chapters  as  those  authors  occur. 
But  there  is  one  late  and  great  exception  which  must  be 
dealt  with  here.  By  far  the  most  important  and  the 
most  thorough-going,  as  well  as  one  of  the  latest  of  those 
which  I  cannot  accept,  is  that  of  Mr.  Robert  Bridges. 
It  would  seem  to  appear  to  some  people  (who,  I  suppose, 
translate  their  own  practice  into  a  rule  for  others)  that  to 
preface  a  criticism  with  a  salute  is  a  sort  of  tongue-in- 
cheek  ceremony,  if  not  even  a  Judas-like  trick.  That  has 
not  been  the  idea  entertained  by  gentlemen  in  England 
at  any  time  of  our  history  ;  and  it  is  not  mine.  When  I 
say  that  I  have  had  the  pleasure  of  knowing  Mr.  Bridges 
for  some  forty  years ;  that  I  have  held  him  for 
the  last  dozen  of  them  as  our  "  next  poet "  in  English, 
and  for  thirty  at  least  as  one  of  our  best ;  that  I  recognise 
VOL.  II  S 


258     LATER  JACOBEAN  fr  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

to  the  full  the  scholarship  and  the  taste  which  accompany 
his  great  poetical  gifts  ;  that  I  know  no  one  who  has 
more  "  fulfilled  all  numbers  "  in  literature, — I  speak  not 
more  "  magnificently "  than  sincerely.  But  the  comple- 
ment of  Amicus  Plato  still  abides  as  the  rule  for  all 
servants  of  the  Muses  of  whatever  degree  ;  and  that  the 
highest  poetical  faculty,  backed  by  scholarship,  will  not 
necessarily  make  a  poet  infallible  when  he  proceeds  from 
practice  to  theory  is  sufficiently  proved  by  no  less  final 
instances  than  that  of  Milton  himself  in  the  matter  of 
rhyme,  and  that  of  Wordsworth  in  the  case  of  Poetic 
Diction.  The  following  is,  I  believe,  a  true  abstract  of 
Mr.  Bridges'  views  on  the  prosody  of  Paradise  Lost,  as 
given  in  the  last  edition  of  his  work  on  the  subject.1 

Mr.  Bridges'  A  typical  blank  -verse  line  has  ten  syllables,  five 
stresses,  and  a  rising  rhythm. 

There  may  be  an  extra  syllable,  and  even  two,  at  the 
end  of  the  line ;  but  Milton  in  Paradise  Lost,  though  not 
in  Comus,  does  not  allow  it  elsewhere,  eliding  it  where 
it  seems  to  occur. 

Elision  extends  to  words  in  -ion,  -ience,  etc.  ;  "  open  " 
vowels,  i.e.  vowels  coming  before  another  or  an  h,  either 
in  the  same  word  or  in  the  next,  while  w  and  wh  for  h 
may  be  disregarded  ;  "  unstressed "  vowels  before  r ; 
"  spirit "  sometimes  but  not  always,  and  "  misery,"  with 
adjectives  in  -able  are  made  the  subject  of  special 
exceptions  ;  unstressed  vowels  before  pure  /  ("  evil "  an 
exception)  ;  vowels  before  pure  n  when  final  (not  neces- 
sarily when  not  final) ;  and  some  others. 

Some  lines  have  only  four,  and  some  probably  only 
three  stresses. 

There  is  in  Milton  much  "  inverted  rhythm,"  which 
may  occur  in  every  foot  or  stress-division,  and  in  more 
than  one. 

Discussion  of  I  have  purposely  made  this  summary  as  simple  as 
possible  to  avoid  ostentation  of  complexity.  But  it  will 
hardly  be  denied  that  it  is  rather  complex  ;  and  it  cannot 

1  Oxford,  1901.     The  important  dealing  in  this  book  with  the  English 
hexameter  will  not  here  concern  us. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  259 

be  denied  at  all  that  it  proceeds  on  the  general  theory 
that  Milton  first  adopted  a  strict  system  and  then  gave 
himself  easements  from  it  in  divers  directions.  Wherever 
an  apparent  breach  of  the  "  ten  syllable,  five  stress,  rising 
rhythm  "  norm  occurs,  you  have  got  to  devise  an  explana- 
tion, or  at  least  a  classification,  of  the  licence  ;  and  some- 
times even  your  explanations  and  classifications  will  not 
hold  good,  and  you  must  have  an  "  exception."  Now  I 
venture  to  think  it  unnecessary  to  urge  at  any  great 
length,  that  prima  facie  the  simpler  explanation  is  always 
to  be  preferred  to  the  more  complex  ;  that  the  more 
numerous  the  epicycles  and  privilegia  required  for  special 
cases,  the  less  probable  is  the  theory  which  requires  them  ; 
that,  in  short,  one  master-key  is  a  great  deal  better  than 
a  whole  bunch  of  jingling  picklocks.  And  I  believe  that 
master-key  to  be  provided  by  the  system  of  foot-scansion, 
with  equivalence  and  substitution,  which  has  been 
championed  throughout  this  book.  I  have  allowed  that 
trisyllabic  feet  had  been  and  were  still  discouraged  in 
theory,  for  a  generation  or  two  before  and  during  Milton's 
time ;  and,  what  is  more,  I  have  shown  the  cause  of  this 
discouragement  But  I  have  shown  also  that  they  had 
existed  ever  since  English  poetry  became  English,  and 
were  only  "  driven  in  "  by  the  mistaken  theory  itself. 

On  our  system,  instead  of  a  tangle  of  rule  and  Contrast  of  it 
exception,  everything  becomes  perfectly  simple.  Milton 
is  writing  on  a  norm  of  five-foot  lines,  which  admits  the 
various  forms,  long-short,  short-long,  long-long,  short- 
short-long,  and  possibly  here  and  there  long-short-short 
and  short-short-short  (this  rather  doubtfully),  just  as 
does  the  Greek  trimeter  with  which  he  was  so  well 
acquainted,  but  on  a  freer  system  of  equivalence,  and 
with  the  final  redundant  syllable  allowed  at  pleasure. 
Very  occasionally  he  allows  himself,  as  Virgil  had  done 
in  his  hexameters,  a  fragment  of  a  line,  very  occasionally 
what  may  be  an  Alexandrine.  But  generally  he  confines 
himself  to  the  so-called  decasyllabic — really  to  the  five- 
foot  line.  His  business  is  with  this,  with  the  equivalence 
of  feet,  with  the  shifting  of  pause,  and  with  the  superior 


260     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  &>  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

concerting  effect  which  we  have  called  the  verse  para- 
graph— to  make  as  harmonious  lines  as  he  can.  He 
makes  them  ;  the  few  exceptions  dealt  with  or  to  be 
dealt  with  presently  requiring  no  privilegium,  no  ex- 
tension of,  or  exception  to,  system,  but  being  simply 
experiments,  more  or  less  successful,  under  that  system, 
and  in  the  carrying  out  of  it.  I  think  a  few  of  them — 
very  few — are  not  quite  successful  ;  and  I  should  be  very 
much  surprised  if  the  case  were  otherwise.  But  I  think 
that  the  enormous  majority,  "  not  five  in  five  score,  but  "  at 
least  ninety -four  and  nineteen -twentieths  "more,"  are1 
successful,  and  that  they  form  the  great  justification  and 
exemplification  of  our  theory.  Only  by  feet,  equivalence, 
and  substitution  can  you  explain  Milton's  prosody  in  a 
manner  worthy  of  Milton,  as  a  natural,  harmonious, 
consistent  process,  and  not  as  a  tissue  of  provisos 
and  saving  clauses — of  Admiralty  orders  overruling  the 
Articles  of  War,  after  the  fashion  ignored  by  innocent  Mr. 
Midshipman  Easy,  and  of  subordinate  officers  producing 
sealed  commissions  from  their  pockets,  after  the  fashion 
in  reference  to  which  D'Artagnan  brought  a  blush  to  the 
cheek  of  Louis  the  Magnificent. 

The  printing  For  the  peculiarities  of  printing  I  have,  I  must  confess, 
very  little  respect,  though,  as  I  have  shown  and  shall 
hope  to  show,  they  are  by  no  means  fatal  to  my  theory 
in  themselves.  To  begin  with,  Milton  was  blind  when 
he  wrote  (or  at  least  printed)  the  Paradises  and  Samson. 
It  is  hard  enough  to  get  an  elaborate  and  rather  arbi- 
trary system  of  will-printing  carried  out  when  you  can  see. 
In  the  second  place,  I  have  myself,  as  the  phrase  goes, 
"seen  too  many  others."  During  the  last  few  years 
especially  I  have  been  reading — reading  narrowly,  and  in 
a  literal  sense  literally — dozens  of  books,  scores  of 
thousands  of  lines,  written  by  Milton's  contemporaries, 
and  printed  in  his  very  times.  The  result  has  informed 
me,  once  for  all,  that  "  apostrophation  "  was  a  trick,  and 
almost  a  fetich,  of  the  day ;  it  has  informed  me  likewise 

1  Perhaps  I  ought  (though  it  is  sad  to  think  it  necessary)  to  remind  the 
reader  of  Person  and  "  The  Germans  in  Greek." 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  261 

that  it  was  a  fetich  most  capriciously,  as  well  as  most 
extravagantly,  worshipped.  I  could  give  many  examples  ;l 
but  the  reader,  unless  he  likes  to  go  through  what  I  have 
gone  through,  will  hardly  appreciate  the  certainty  of  the 
conclusion.  Yet  this  certainty  is  clenched,  endorsed, 
made  absolute  by  the  fact  that  the  very  printing  of 
Paradise  Lost  does  not  bear  out  what  it  is  supposed  to 
bear  out — that  it  actually  contradicts  itself  again  and 
again,  and  that  it  omits  almost  more  strikingly  than  it 
contradicts. 

When    the    two    systems    come    to     be    applied,    the  Cacophonies. 
difference  of  their  results  must  no  doubt  be  subject  to  the 

grand  caution — De  gustibus .     There  may  be  people 

whose  ears  are  not  offended  by  "  om'nous  "  and  "  pop'lar," 
by  "  thupright,"  and  by 

Abominablunutterabl  and  worse, 

instead  of  the  smoothly  flowing,  musically  rippling 
measure  and  murmur  of  the  trisyllabically  admixed 
cadence.  But  the  doctrines  of  stress-omission  and  in- 
version seem  to  lead  to  even  stranger  results.  I  cannot 
understand  how  any  one  can  not  merely  propose  to  scan 
with  trochaic  endings 

Beyond  all  past  example  and  future 

(where  ffiturus  was  evidently  sitting  at  Milton's  ear  rather 
Satanically),  and 

Which  of  us  who  beholds  the  bright  surface 

(where,  as  evidently,  he  was  mentally  separating  the 
syllables  and  giving  "  face "  its  usual  value),  but  can 
actually  see  beauty  in  the  latter.2  But  the  omission  of 
stresses  gives  the  strangest  results  of  all.  To  make 

As  in  luxurious  cities,  where  the  noise 
a  line  of  four  stresses  only  ;  much  more 

His  ministers  of  vengeance  and  pursuit 

1  See  Minor  Caroline  Poets,  vols.  i.  and  ii.      Oxford,  1905-6. 

2  It  is  perhaps  worth  observing  that   "surmise,"  "surprise,"  and  other 
dissyllabic  noun-compounds  with  "sur-"  keep  the  ultimate  long. 


262     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

a  line  of  three,  seems  to  me  not  only  quite  unnecessary — 
my  five  "  feet  "  being  perfectly  perceptible  in  both — but 
unthinkable.  I  simply  cannot  read,  hear,  or  see  the  one 
with  four  stresses  and  the  other  with  three  ;  the  attempt 
to  do  so  results,  for  me,  in  a  mere  welter  of  gabbled  sound. 
The  "scanned  It  may,  however,  be  said,  "You  are  kicking  (and  that 
nounced"  rather  rudely)  at  an  open  door.  Have  you  not  Mr. 
argument.  Bridges'  explicit  declaration  that  he  does  not  think  that 
there  can  be  any  doubt  whether  elided  syllables  should 
be  pronounced  ?  Does  he  not  go  so  far  as  to  say, 
'Though  Milton  printed  "Th"  Almighty,"  it  cannot  be 
supposed  that  he  wished  it  to  be  so  pronounced '  ?  and 
yet  more,  '  In  English  the  open  vowel  is  always  pro- 
nounced '  ?  Does  he  not  yet  further  admit  that  Milton's 
own  practice  '  is  somewhat  inconsistent  and  arbitrary '  ?  " 
Most  certainly:  these  citations  are  true  citations.  I  have 
been  acquainted  with  the  statements  ever  since  they  were 
made,  and  have  always  determined  that,  should  I  ever 
have  occasion  to  handle  the  matter,  they  should  be 
prominently  acknowledged.  But  I  must  observe,  in  the 
first  place,  that  whatever  Mr.  Bridges  may  admit,  his 
predecessors  in  the  same  theory  of  scansion  did  not  admit 
this.  Dryden,  who  was  contemporary  with  Milton  for 
two-thirds  of  his  own  life,  who  had  projected  a  treatise  on 
Prosody,  and  who  had  not  improbably  talked  with  Milton 
on  the  subject,  lays  down,  totidem  verbis,  that  "  no  vowel 
can  be  cut  off  when  we  cannot  sink  the  pronunciation 
of  it."  The  great  Bysshe,  whom  it  is  the  fashion  to  pooh- 
pooh  and  keep  in  the  background  (as  is  the  case  also 
with  Guest,  because  both  had  the  complete  but  maladroit 
courage  of  their  opinions),  is  entirely  explicit  on  the 
subject ;  and  he  did  no  more  than  boldly  formulate  what 
generations  believed.  "  Beauteous,"  he  says,  "  is  two 
syllables,  '  victorious '  is  three  "  ;  and  he  (from  his  own 
point  of  view,  justly)  scolds  Milton  for  making  "  riot "  one 
syllable,  which  it  certainly  cannot  be  unless  you  pro- 
nounce it  "  rot  "  or  "  rite."  Bysshe  I  understand.  I 
think  him  wrong  to  a  ghastly  extent — hideously  and 
hatefully  wrong.  But  I  comprehend  his  theory  ;  I  know 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  263 

whence  it  arose  and  what  it  meant ;  I  think  that  if  you 
take  his  premisses — which  I  am  so  far  from  taking — it 
is  a  logical  and  a  necessary  conclusion.  Moreover,  his 
predecessors,  his  contemporaries  and  students,  and  the 
majority  of  the  next  three  generations  so  understood  him, 
though  they  agreed  with  him  ;  others,  like  Shenstone,  so 
understood  him,  though  they  had  the  sense  to  disagree 
with  him.  The  printers  who  printed  "  watry "  and 
"  tendring,"  whether  with  or  without  the  apostrophe,  held 
the  same  theory  and  meant  to  express  it.  To  them  these 
contractions  were  either  not  ugly,  or,  ugly  or  not,  were  a 
deliberate  sacrifice  to  a  theory  of  metre.  I  repeat  that  I 
understand  them  thoroughly,  and  confess  them  to  be 
consistent.  I  should  like  to  say,  "  Off  with  their  heads  !  " 
but  that  is  different. 

Heaven  forbid  that  I  should  say,  "  Off  with  Mr. 
Bridges'  head  ! "  but  I  must  admit  that  his  position  is 
to  me  quite  incomprehensible.  Pronounce  these  syllables 
and  you  have  trisyllabic  feet  at  once — all  the  trisyllabic 
feet  that  I  want,  and  all  that  I  contend  for.  But,  it 
seems,  you  must,  under  some  strange  theory  of  divorce 
of  scansion  and  pronunciation,  say  that  they  are  not 
trisyllabic  feet.  Why  ?  The  ecclesiastic,  in  the  fabliau 
so  often  related  and  utilised,  who  thanked  Heaven  "for 
this  good  carp "  when  he  was  eating  his  Friday  capon, 
had  a  very  obvious,  and  from  his  point  of  view  sufficient, 
reason  for  his  direct  freedom  with  zoology,  and  his  in- 
direct one  with  syllables.  But  what  is  prosodically  gained 
by  calling  "  capon  "  "  carp  "  or  "  caviare  "  "  capon  "  ?  by 
pronouncing  "  riot  "  as  "  riot  "  and  scanning  it  as  "  rot  "  ? 
I  cannot  for  the  very  life  of  me  see  what  is  the  object  or 
the  purpose  of  these  prosodic  fictions.1  Sometimes  I  have 
thought  that  the  influence  of  music  (which,  as  I  have  more 
than  once  hinted,  seems  to  me  generally  detrimental  to 
sound  prosodic  views)  may  have  had  something  to  do  with 

1  Of  course  it  may  be  said  that  the  whole  thing  is  merely  a  logomachy — 
that  Mr.  Bridges'  system  of  elision  is  after  all  only  one  of  classifying  the 
occurrences  of  "  trisyllabic  feet,"  etc.  But  I  must  repeat  my  appeal  to 
Bysshism.  The  system  (or  something  very  like  it)  "  has  deceived  our  fathers 
and  may  us." 


264     LA  TER  JA  CO  BE  AN  &•  CA  ROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  v  i 

the  matter.  When  a  man  is  accustomed  to  the  trans- 
mogrification of 

When  the  bloom  is  on  the  rye  ' 
into 

When  the  bloo-hoo-hoom  is  o-ho-hon  the  rye, 

it  may  seem  to  him  immaterial  whether  you  pronounce 
"  ominous  "  and  scan  "  om'nous,"  whether,  in  your  desire 
to  find  only  "  three  stresses  "  in 

His  min  |isters  |  of  venjgeance  and  |  pursuit, 
you  stagger  wildly  from  "  His  min  |  "  to  "  isters  of  ven    " 

and  thence  to  "  -geance  and  pursuit." 

For  my  part,  as  I  have  said  again  and  again,  prosodic 
arrangements  are  to  me  merely  the  systematisation  of  the 
way  in  which  a  man,  familiar  with  the  language  and  of 
trained  ear,  reads  good  poetry  to  himself  or  others.  I 
have  no  need  of  the  rack  or  of  the  knife  of  Procrustes, 
of  the  orb  or  of  the  epicycle  of  Ptolemy ;  just  as,  on  the 
other  hand,  I  have  no  organs  which  will  enable  me  to 
patter  or  skate  over  three  short  syllables  in 

And  in  luxurious  cities  where  the  noise, 

till  I  clutch,  panting,  the  blessed  u  of  "  -urious." 

I  have  compared  scansion  of  this  kind  before  to  a 
drunkard  staggering  from  post  to  post ;  and  it  also  much 
resembles  an  unskilful  hurdle-racer  taking  his  jumps  now 
too  short  and  now  too  long.  But  the  most  perfect  simile 
to  my  fancy  is  one  the  material  of  which  most  people 
know  who  have  been  unlucky  enough  to  be  quartered  in  a 
railway  hotel  on  the  side  overlooking  a  shunting  yard. 
They  will  remember  how,  in  the  dead  waist  and  middle 
of  the  night,  they  were  aroused,  and  kept  awake  till  it  was 
time  to  get  up,  by  something  like  this — 

RAM  ! ra-RAM  !  -  -  -  ra-ra-ra-RAM  !  -  -  -  RAM-ra-RAM  !  -  -  ra- 

RAM-ra  !  -  -  -  RAM  ! 

That  is  the  tune  of  accentual  scansion  in  its  altitudes. 
But   it   has   also   and    further   occurred   to  me,  as    of 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  265 

course  it  must  have  occurred  to  others,  that  this  prefer-  classical 
ence  of  fiction  over  fact  may  be  due  to  some  confusion  Parallels,and 

*  comparisons. 

with  classical  practice,  though,  as  a  rule,  the  very  people 
who  most  object  to  trisyllabic  feet,  to  foot  -  scansion 
generally,  are  also  those  who  object  to  the  use,  in  English, 
of  the  terms  of  classical  prosody  itself.  Now,  putting 
this  aside,  and  putting  aside  also  the  minor  difficulties  of 
that  practice  itself,  such  as  the  indication  of  elision  in 
Greek  and  its  partial  non-indication  in  Latin,1  there  is  in 
this  connection  a  much  greater  puzzle.  Suppose  that 
Milton  did  wish  to  imitate  at  once  the  Greek  practice  of 
scrupulously  indicating  elision,  and  the  Latin  practice  of 
at  least  sometimes  not  indicating  it  but  arranging  the 
metrical  scheme  as  if  it  were  indicated.  Suppose,  further, 
to  stretch  concession  as  far  as  possible,  that  he  believed 
the  Romans,  if  not  the  Greeks  also,  to  have  pronounced 
what  they  did  not  scan.  After  all  this  a  huger  difficulty 
occurs.  Elision,  both  in  Greek  and  in  Latin,  is  fairly 
universal  under  its  own  rules.  There  are,  of  course,  a  few 
instances  of  permitted  hiatus,  but  they  are  very  few  in 
proportion  and  are  generally  in  somewhat  exceptional 
circumstances.  But  Milton  observes  no  such  uniformity. 
He  may  "elide"  the  e  of  "the"  rather  oftener  than  he 
leaves  it  unquestionably  hiant ;  but  that,  on  my  theory, 
needs  no  explanation,  because  he  thereby  gets  the  tri- 
syllabic foot  he  wants.  At  any  rate,  he  never  hesitates 
not  to  "  elide  "  it.  He  may  make  "  Spirit,"  dissyllabic  as  I 
take  it,  a  pyrrhic 2  rather  oftener  than  he  makes  it  an 
iambus,  but  he  never  hesitates  to  do  the  latter  ;  the  same 
with  "  Heaven  "  ;  the  same  mutatis  mutandis  with  "  evil." 
On  the  trisyllabic  system,  once  more,  there  is  no  reason 
why  he  should  not  do  so  ;  on  the  strict  dissyllabic  there 
is  much.  So  with  "-able";  so  with  the  liquid -followed 

1  I  suspect,  however,  and  may  possibly  again  touch  on  the  suspicion,  that 
this  has  a  good  deal  to  do  with  the  matter  :  and  I  design  to  deal  also  with 
the  Italian  practice  of  elision.      But  sometimes,  when  I  hear  people  dwelling 
on  Milton's  "  Italianation,"  I  cannot  held  thinking  of  those  brave  and  beau- 
tiful verses  of  Peacock's  about  "  oak  and  beech."     You  never  can  teach  John 
Milton — he  never  could   teach  himself,   though  he  may  have  tried — to  be 
aught  but  an  English  poet. 

2  I.e.  in  itself,  not  a  pyrrhic  foot. 


266     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

vowels,  for  which  some  of  our  flamens  devise  such  "  service 
quaint "  ;  so  with  io  and  oa  and  ae.  On  the  one  theory  it 
is  all  right :  they  are  always  two,  and  he  adds  a  third  or 
not  as  the  rhythm  leads  him.  On  the  other  they  are 
sometimes  two  gentlemen  in  one  and  sometimes  two 
gentlemen  in  two,  at  a  purely  arbitrary  choice.  Which 
is  the  more  reasonable? 

The  true  When,  in  short,  we  discard,  on  the  one  hand,  non- 
position0  natural  imaginings,  and,  on  the  other,  the  earless  or  eyeless 
of  Milton,  cavil,  idol-begot,  of  the  Bysshes  and  even  the  Johnsons  ; 
when  we  subject  Milton's  prosody  to  the  plain  and  simple 
system  which  we  have  seen  establishing  itself  from  the 
very  first,  and  shall  see  confirmed  to  the  latest  syllable  of 
recorded  English  verse, — all  difficulties  vanish,  all  cumbrous 
etiquettes  and  ceremonies  disappear,  and  we  are  face  to 
face  not  only  with  one  of  the  most  perfect  developments 
of  English  prosody  itself,  but  in  a  certain  sense — and  only 
a  certain  sense — with  its  final  development.  It  took,  as 
it  were,  a  lease  of  three  lives,  and  a  sequence  of  three 
works,  to  effect  this  final  estatement ;  leaving,  of  course, 
the  development  of  the  estate  itself  open  to  endless 
possibilities.  Spenser,  completing  the  task  of  his  humbler 
predecessors,  restored  and  reconstituted  English  poetry 
once  for  all  from  the  chaos  of  doggerel,  but  in  so  doing 
deprived  it  of  a  certain  amount  of  freedom,  "  kept  it  up  " 
very  tight,  and  hardly,  after  the  Kalendar,  essayed  the 
looser  measures.  Shakespeare,  availing  himself  of  the 
almost  infinite  possibilities  of  blank  verse  on  the  one  hand, 
and  not  neglecting  those  of  other  metres,  restored  and 
vastly  enlarged  freedom  itself.  But  his  successors * 
loosened  and  liquefied  blank  verse  yet  further  into  sloppy 
doggerel,  almost  as  bad  as,  if  not  worse  than,  the  worst 
fifteenth -sixteenth -century  mixture  ;  and  although  they 
wrote  exquisite  lyric,  "  turned  it  to  prettiness  "  too  often. 
Then  Milton,  applying  the  astringent  of  his  austerely 
beautiful  style,  and  the  widely  conditioned  but  never 
slipshod  order  of  his  measures,  tightened  things  up  again, 
yet  with  all  adequate  possibilities  of  easement. 

1  Those  to  whom  we  are  coming,  not  those  with  whom  we  have  dealt. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  267 

There  is,  of  course,  much  difference  in  his  verse,  as  in 
his  style  ;  and  one  might  have  thought  that  this  difference 
would  act  as  a  warning  to  those  who,  as  in  Chaucer's  case, 
iosist  on  a  cast-iron  uniformity  in  this  respect,  a  uniformity 
ungracious  in  itself,  and  not  reasonably  exigible  from,  or 
imponible  on,  a  poet's  work.  From  the  liquid  lapses  of 
L  Allegro,  II  Penseroso,  and  Comus ;  from  the  absolutely 
golden  mean,  between  ease  and  stateliness,  of  Lycidas,  to  the 
almost  harsh  and  certainly  austere  modulation  of  parts  of 
Samson,  is  a  far  cry  indeed.  But  we  have  dealt  with  the 
stages  already.  Here  it  is  only  necessary  to  dwell,  and 
that  briefly,  on  the  varied  perfection  of  the  result,  and  on 
the  immense  importance  of  it  as  a  sealed  pattern  and 
standing  example  to  all  future  writers.  Throughout  the 
days  of  ignorance  and  apostrophation,  in  this  respect  as  in 
others,  Shakespeare  and  Milton  remained  the  Jachin  and 
the  Boaz  of  the  temple  of  true  English  prosody,  between 
whom  any  who  chose  could  enter.  The  very  people  who 
reproved  them  admitted  their  greatness  ;  the  very  reproofs 
could  not  but  suggest  to  an  ingenuous  Shenstone  or  a 
forerunning  Cowper  that  it  was  the  reprovers,  not  the 
reproved,  who  were  wrong.  Did  anybody  make  a  fetich 
of  exactly  corresponding  metre  ?  The  trochaic  lines  of  the 
smaller  poems  showed  his  folly  as  soon  "  as  judging  by 
the  result "  was  attempted.  Did  any  one  lay  it  down  that 
ten  syllables,  and  no  more,  are  to  go  to  an  English  heroic 
line  ?  Hundreds  of  lines  in  Paradise  Lost  were  there  to 
sound  cacophonously  if  you  cut  them  down,  musically  if 
you  left  them  alone.  Did  his  own  petulant  malediction  of 
rhyme  cause  Israel  to  sin  ?  All  the  early  pieces  and  not 
a  little  in  Samson  said,  "  Never  mind  what  he  says  when 
he  is  a  pedant  in  a  pet ;  look  what  he  does  when  he  is  a 
singer  in  his  singing  robes."  And  the  whole  work,  from 
the  Nativity  Ode  to  Samson  itself,  from  the  Arcades 
choruses  to  the  stately  tirades  of  Paradise  Regained, 
proclaims — one  cannot  say  unmistakably,  but  in  such  a 
fashion  that  one  can  only  marvel  at  any  mistake — the 
three  great  laws  of  English  prosody  :  Foot-arrangement, 
Substitution,  and  Equivalence.  • 


268     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

I  shall  indeed  be  so  very  bold  as  to  claim  Milton,  not 
merely — as  I  claim  every  one  from  Godric  to  Tennyson — 
as  evidence  of  the  truth  of  the  system  here  championed, 
but  as  an  open-eyed  and  intentional  practitioner  of  it. 
Such  a  practitioner  hardly  exists l  before  Spenser  ;  and 
Spenser,  though  I  believe  he  always  scanned  by  feet,  was 
evidently,  after  his  earlier  experiments  in  the  Kalendar, 
somewhat  shy  of  equivalence  and  substitution,  which 
indeed  were  not  much  wanted,  and  might  have  been 
dangerous  if  too  freely  used,  in  his  great  stanza.  That 
Shakespeare  thought  of  his  scansion,  except  in  a  general 
way  as  more  and  more  expressing  and  satisfying  the 
demands  of  an  impeccable  ear,  I  do  not  affirm  or  deny, 
because  I  believe  it  to  be  absolutely  unsafe  to  affirm  or 
deny  anything  about  what  Shakespeare  consciously  did. 
But  from  the  passages  in  the  Sonnets  and  in  the  very 
defiance  gloved  up  on  the  front  of  Paradise  Lost,  from  the 
general  character  of  the  scansion  (especially  the  blank- 
verse  scansion)  of  the  successive  poems,  and  still  more 
from  a  feature  to  be  noticed  presently,  I  do  believe  that 
Milton  deliberately  scanned  his  verse  as  I  scan  it — if  not 
to  the  minutest  detail,  yet  in  all  general  points  of  foot- 
division,  equivalence,  and  substitution.  I  am  not  only 
sure  that  no  other  so  well  accounts  for  the  actual  result : 
I  do  not  believe  that  any  other  will  account  at  all  for  the 
production  of  that  result,  and  especially  for  the  production 
of  some  of  the  least,  as  of  the  most,  absolutely  delectable 
points  in  it.  For  I  am  by  no  means  prepared  to 
go  to  the  length  of  some  Miltonolaters,  and  to  regard 
his  metrical  experiments  as  impeccably  harmonious. 
Far  be  it  from  me  to  fall  into  the  gainsaying  of  Guest, 
and  quarrel  with  his  most  beautiful  lines  because  they  are 
"  against  every  principle "  of  this  or  that  theory  of 
scansion.  On  the  contrary,  I  have  said  generally  that  if 
a  theory  of  scansion  and  the  judgment  of  a  good  ear 
conflict,  the  theory  must  give  way.  The  things  that  I 
less  love  in  Milton  do  not  conflict  with  my  theory,  but 

1  I  may  perhaps  refer  to  the  Preface  for  some  remarks  on  the  singular 
ideas  apparently  entertained  by  some  persons  on  this  subject. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  269 

the  contrary  ;  and  seeing  that  I  can  quite  comprehend,  I 
can  almost  pardon  though  I  do  not  like  them.  A  great 
many  things  hideous  to  me  on  the  other  system  become 
quite  agreeable,  and  sometimes  exquisitely  beautiful,  on 
mine  ;  but  it  leaves  some  disagreeable.  It  has  to  account 
for  this,  and  I  think  it  does. 

It  is,  at  any  rate,  perfectly  ready  to  do  so.  Wherever 
there  occurs  in  Milton  a  line  that  the  allowance  of 
trisyllabic  feet  will  not  make  harmonious,  the  result  will, 
I  believe,  be  found  to  be  due  to  some  use  of  substitution 
theoretically  correct,  but  in  result  and  the  particular  case 
unsuccessful.  Now  I  have  kept  throughout  the  proviso, 
extended  and  suspended,  that  each  language  has  its  own 
mysterious  metrical  decencies  and  indecencies,  and  that 
these  are,  to  my  theories  of  versification  and  to  all  others, 
what  the  Fates  were  to  Zeus.  Milton,  always  impatient 
of  control,  tried,  I  think,  to  defy  the  Fates  (like  Burgoyne 
at  Saratoga),  and  sometimes  with  a  similar  result.  His 
defiances  appear  to  me  sometimes  simple  experiments 
— the  strange  hit-or-miss  fugues  and  toccatas  of  the 
Samson  choruses  pretty  certainly  were  so, — and  if  he 
had  lived  they  would  almost  certainly  have  been  turned 
into  the  things  of  beauty  that  some  of  them  are  nearly 
or  already,  as  it  is.  In  one  particular,  too,  he  was  always 
under  an  influence  which  was  dangerous,  and  that  was 
his  affection  for  Italian,  and  the  ruling  Italian  foot,  the 
trochee.  He  had  got  beautiful  effects  out  of  mixed 
iambic  and  trochaic  scansions  in  separate  lines  and  in 
the  octosyllabic l  as  early  almost  as  he  got  out  of  his 
poetic  nonage,  and  he  seems  always  to  have  been 
hankering  after  something  of  the  same  sort  in  the  longer 
line.  To  this  are  due  his  choriambic  endings,  his  ditro- 
chaic  and  antispastic  beginnings.  There  are  not  a  few 
who  say  they  like  these,  and  perhaps  some  who  really  do. 
I  cannot  say  that  I  do,2  though,  as  I  have  said,  they  are 

1  Compare  again  Chaucer  and  the  "acephalous"  line. 

2  Thus    I   have    no   affection   for   his    "bottomless   pit"  whether  it   be 

"bottomless"  or  "bottomless"  ;  and  I  think  "universal  reproach,"  whether 
it  be  "universal"  or  "universal,"  "far  worse  to  hear"  in  another  sense  than 


270     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

perfectly  justifiable  as  experiments  on  my  theory,  which 
passes  them  over,  duly  vises,  to  the  higher  tribunal  of  the 
ear.  The  same  is  the  case  with  an  occasional  accumula- 
tion of  trisyllabic  feet,  sometimes  running  close  to  the 
tribrach,  and  with  the  other  accumulation,  close  together, 
of  redundantly  ended  lines.  I  dare  say  I  may  be  wrong 
in  disliking  these,  but  at  any  rate  I  am  not  "  doing  in- 
justice by  a  law."  My  law  licenses  them  all. 

Conclusion  on  There  are,  fortunately,  points  of  Milton's  prosody 
which  lie  aPart  from  this  peculiar  and  probably  irrecon- 
cilable debate.  His  use  of  pause  is  unique.  Like 
Shakespeare,  he  will  put  it  anywhere  or  nowhere,  so  as 
to  achieve  those  "  periods  of  a  declaimer  "  which  disturbed 
Dr.  Johnson,  bereft  of  his  accustomed  warning-bell  of 
rhyme  to  tell  him  he  was  reading  poetry.  But  (and  I 
do  not  think  that  this  has  been  quite  so  much  noticed 
as  it  should  have  been)  Milton  does  not,  like  Shakespeare, 
make  the  lines  embrace  and  intertwine  in  the  marvellous 
manner  which  constitutes  the  final  secret  of  blank  verse 
of  the  particular  kind,  and  which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  has 
never  been  quite  recovered.  His  old  fancy  for  the  self- 
enclosed  line  of  the  Marlowe  group  seems  in  a  manner 
to  have  persisted,  though  he  subdues  it  wonderfully  to 
the  purposes  of  the  verse  paragraph.  His  use  of  that 
paragraph  was  no  doubt  suggested  (though,  it  may  be, 
quite  unconsciously)  by  Shakespeare  ;  but  the  contrast 
of  dramatic  and  narrative  requirements,  as  well  as  some- 
thing in  the  two  men,  differentiates  it.  It  is  not  Milton's 
way  to  wind  up  a  paragraph  to  the  highest  soar  of 
possibility  and  then  let  it  "  stoop "  suddenly  as  in  those 
ineffable  triumphs  of  versification  which  close  Othello. 
The  verse  paragraphs  of  Milton  are  more  like  the  prose 
paragraphs  of  Hooker,  which  rise,  keep  level  perhaps  for 
a  time,  and  then  gently  slope  to  their  conclusion.  Some- 
times he  arrests  the  slope  a  little  before  the  actual  lower 
limit ;  but  he  seldom  finishes  off  with  an  artificial  flourish, 

the  original.  Others  are  open  to  no  sound  objection,  and  some  are  beautiful 
exceedingly.  But  they  are  beauties,  not  indeed  in  the  least  "monstrous" 
in  kind,  but  somewhat  hazardous  in  the  individual  instance. 


CHAP,  i  MILTON  271 

as  Thomson,  in  imitating  him,  too  often  did.  We  shall 
have  to  wait  for  Tennyson  before  we  can  find  any  thirds- 
man  for  Shakespeare  and  Milton  in  the  use  of  this  device  ; 
but  it  was  Milton  who  distinctly  indicated  it  as  a  special 
resource  to  English  poets. 

In  another  he  has  no  rival  in  English  ;  while  Hugo, 
the  only  possible  one  elsewhere,  is  much  more  uncertain 
in  his  use  of  it,  and  sometimes  grotesque.  This,  it  need 
hardly  be  added,  is  the  use  of  the  proper  name.  If  we 
combine  the  tenets  of  the  austerer  sects  or  wings  of 
Christianity  on  both  sides,  the  doctrine  that  intense  en- 
joyment of  carnal  things  is  sin  with  that  of  Purgatory, 
it  is  to  be  feared  that  Milton  must  have  found  the 
"  milder  shades  "  not  so  mild  in  respect  of  his  indulgence 
in  this  pleasure.  He  simply  intoxicates  himself,  and  all 
his  readers  who  have  the  luck  to  be  susceptible  of  the 
intoxication,  with  the  honey,  or  rather  the  "  Athole  brose," 
of  this  marvellous  name -accompaniment.  To  the  com- 
paratively simple  instances  of  it  in  Comus  and  Lycidas 
may  be  added  : — the  Hebraic  titles  of  the  demon-gods 
and  their  shrines  almost  at  the  opening  of  Paradise  Lost ; 
the  Fable-  or  Romance-names  later  ;  the  shorter  passage 
in  Satan's  voyage,  and  that  couplet  almost  equalling  the 
earlier  in  Lycidas — 

Blind  Thamyris  and  blind  Maeonides 

And  Tiresias  and  Phineus — prophets  of  old  ; 

the  inhabitants  of  Limbo  ;  the  earthly  Paradises  in  Book 
IV.  ;  others,  though  perhaps  less  conspicuous,  in  the 
central  Books,  down  to  the  geographical  illustrations  of 
the  bridge-building  of  Sin  and  Death,  and  those  others 
of  the  change  of  nature  after  the  Fall,  and  the  gorgeous 
catalogue  of  what  was  not  seen  from  the  Mount  of 
Speculation  to  which  the  archangel  took  Adam.  The 
taste,  too,  seems  to  have  grown  upon  him,  for  short  as 
is  Paradise  Regained  it  contains — in  the  passage  of  the 
tempter's  feast,  in  the  panoramas  of  Parthia,  with  the 
final  reference  to  the  Orlando,  and  the  parallel  ones  of 
Rome  and  Athens — masterpieces  of  the  kind,  sometimes 


272     LATER  JACOBEAN  &*  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

extra-illustrated  with  alliteration    as    in   the  famous  and 
delightful 

Knights  of  Logres  and  of  Lyonesse, 

Lancelot  and  Pelleas  and  Pellenore, 

which  Tennyson  imitated  less  wisely  than  well. 

And  so  let    us  leave,  with  words  in  which  all    may 
agree,  the  last  of  the  Four  Masters  of  English  Prosody. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS 

The  main  currents  of  mid-seventeenth-century  prosody — The  use  of 
the  couplet — The  pioneers — Fairfax — Sir  John  Beaumont — 
Sandys — The  first  main  practitioners — Waller — Characteristics 
of  his  smoothness — His  other  metres — Their  moral  as  to  the 
couplet — Cowley — His  curious  position — His  couplet  generally 
— The  Davideis — His  own  principles — His  lyrics — Denham 
— The  opposite  or  enjambed  form — Chalkhill,  Marmion,  and 
Chamberlayne — The  constitutive  difference  of  the  two  styles — 
Dangers  of  enjambment — Note  on  the  two  couplets. 

THAT  Milton  is  the  greatest  single  figure  prosodically,  as  The  main 
he  is  poetically,  in  the  mid-seventeenth  century,  is  un-  ^d^even- 
deniable.      But    his    prosodic  influence  was    not    actually  teenth-century 
exerted  till  long  after  this  time,  and  he  does  not  represent  pr° 
any  of   the   actual    prosodic    movements  or    phenomena 
which    were    most    characteristic    of    the    day.        These 
movements    or    phenomena  were,  in    the    main,  three — 
all  of  great  importance — the  Battle  of  the  Couplets,  the 
break-up  of  Blank  Verse,  and  the  culmination  of  Lyric, 
To  them  we  must  now  turn. 

The  present  chapter  will  be  arranged  in  accordance 
with  the  general  method  of  presenting,  as  far  as  possible, 
a  chronologically  continuous  account  of  the  prosodic 
performance  of  individuals,  but  of  grouping,  with  a 
certain  "  before-and-after  "  licence,  exemplars  of  specially 
remarkable  prosodic  developments.  That  is  to  say,  it 
will  refer  to  some  things  which  saw  the  light  during  the 
period  of  the  last  Book,  and,  it  may  be,  to  some  that 
have  been  already  mentioned  there,  in  order  to  survey 

VOL.  II  273  T 


274     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

intelligibly  what  is  perhaps  the  main  prosodic  phenomenon 
of  the  first  two-thirds  of  the  seventeenth  century — the 
emergence  of  the  decasyllabic  couplet  as  the  staple  metre 
of  English  poetry  ;  the  flourishing  side  by  side  for  a  while 
of  its  two  forms,  the  overlapped  and  the  self-contained  ; 
and  the  final  triumph  of  the  latter.  This  last  stage  we 
shall  not  here  reach  ;  the  other  two  will  be  our  immediate 
province. 

The  use  of  the        We  have  seen  in  the  first  volume  that  the  couplet,  if 
couplet.  not  Qf  tne  very  beginnings — the  earth-born  originals — of 

strictly  English  prosody,  makes  attempts  to  be  born  as 
early  as  the  Orison  of  Our  Lady,  figures  in  the  "  heap  "  of 
twelfth-  and  thirteenth-century  measures,  and  shows  itself 
pretty  frequently,  if  accidentally,  in  Hampole  and  in  the 
anonymous  poems  of  the  Vernon  and  other  MSS.  during 
the  fourteenth.  It  is  finally  established  by  Chaucer  in 
something  like  both  its  forms,  or  rather  in  a  form  which 
very  readily  becomes  either,  though  the  temporary 
prevalence  of  the  redundant  syllable  is  against  the 
sharpest-cut  outline  of  ridge-backed  stop. 

We  saw,  further,  that  this  latest  and  in  a  sense 
greatest  triumph  of  Chaucer's  art  was  comparatively 
little  followed  by  his  actual  followers,  and  that  those 
who  did  attempt  it  were  almost  more  unlucky  than  with 
rhyme-royal.  In  fact,  nothing  shows  the  "  staggers  "  of 
this  period  quite  so  well  (and  therefore  so  ill)  as  the 
couplet,  and  nothing  could,  unless  it  were  blank  verse, 
which  was  not  then  written.  The  octosyllable  is  so 
short,  has  so  many  licences,  and  can  be  so  easily  botched 
off  after  a  fashion,  with  click/  rhymes  and  expletives,  that 
it  offers  little  difficulty  to  the  mediocris  poeta  ;  and  rhyme- 
royal  itself  is  long  enough  to  give  that  poet  a  sort  of 
chance  (in  the  old  provincial  phrase)  of  "  odding  it  till 
it  comes  even."  But  the  couplet  is  at  once  long  enough 
to  admit,  and  too  short  to  hide,  the  most  gruesome 
deformities  and  anomalies.  The  early  practice  of  it  in  the 
next  century  on  the  stage  probably  did  not  a  little  good, 
for  nobody  could  speak  couplets  like  some  of  Lydgate's 
without  being  sensible  of  their  ugliness.  And  as  soon 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  275 

as  the  strict  belief  in  iambic  feet,  "  keeping  of  accent " 
and  the  like,  came  in,  the  couplet  began  to  be  possible, 
and  was  sure  to  be  practised.  This  same  belief  made 
directly,  and  at  last  successfully,  for  the  stopped  form  ; 
but  it  could  not  be  admitted  at  once.  The  stanza, 
with  its  comparatively  ample  space,  had  got  too  much 
into  the  poetic  blood  of  Englishmen,  and  they  could  not 
at  once  give  up  elbow-room.  Accordingly  in  Spenser, 
Drayton,  Daniel,  and  others,  as  we  have  seen,  the  character 
is  still  somewhat  undetermined ;  it  is  only  after  the 
beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century  that  it  begins  to 
differentiate  itself  in  an  unmistakable  way.  Of  the 
special  stopped  form,  not  of  course  the  actual  genesis 
but  the  intermediate  origin  may  still  be  assigned,  with 
fair  if  not  absolute  exactness,  to  a  name  already  con- 
secrated by  tradition. 

Whether  the  reader,  who  comes  to  the  perusal  of  The  pioneers 
Fairfax's  Tasso  with  a  remembrance  of  the  praises  which  — Fairfax- 
have  been  bestowed  upon  it  by  poets  and  critics  of 
various  times  and  tastes,  will  or  will  not  experience 
something  of  disappointment  in  regard  to  actual  poetic 
pleasure,  is  a  question  which  may  be  posed,  but  need  not 
be  discussed.  The  prosodic  importance  of  this  painful 
translator  and  father  of  witch-beset  virgins1  is  quite 
undeniable.  It  is,  in  fact,  constituted  irrefragably  by  the 
fact  of  Dryden's  well-known  assertion  that  Waller  told 
him  that  he  had  been  influenced  by  Fairfax.  If,  therefore, 
he  was  no  poet's  poet  he  was  a  reformer's  reformer.  And 
let  nobody  interject  any  doubt  about  Waller's  actual  part 
in  a  certain  rather  questionable  "  reform  of  our  numbers." 
The  people  who  followed  that  reform  believed 2  in  his 
part  in  it  for  a  century  and  a  half,  and  that  is  the  point 
of  importance.  We  may  make  a  new  translation-applica- 
tion of  possunt  quia  posse  videntur,  and  say  that  the 

1  See    the   curious   story   in    Scott's    Demonology   or   in   Fairfax's   own 
Daemonologia  (ed.  Laing,  Harrogate,  1882). 

2  There  is  a,  very  curious  instance  of  Waller-idolatry  in  the  verse  prefixed 
by  Robert  Gould  to  the  1682  edition  of  Fairfax  himself — 

Let  Waller  be  our  standard,  all  beyond, 
Though  spoke  at  court,  is  foppery  and  fond. 


276     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  6-  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

influence  which  is  acknowledged  is  evidently  an  influence 
which  exists.  It  is  not  necessary  to  waste  words  on  the 
illusory  objection  that  Fairfax,  writing  in  stanza,  could 
hardly  have  much  to  do  with  the  introduction  of  the 
couplet.  He  did  write  in  stanza  ;  but  his  stanza  was  the 
octave  with  couplet  close,  and  it  is  evident  from  the  very 
first  that  he  was  inclined — and  did  not  resist  his  inclina- 
tion— to  isolate  this.1  Tasso  himself  had  not  commonly 
run  his  stanzas  into  one  another,  even  to  the  extent  of 
allowing  less  than  a  full  stop  at  the  end  ;  and  his  sixth 
lines,  though  they  admit  a  little  more  licence,  are  gener- 
ally full-stopped  also.  Fairfax  enjambs  the  sixth  a  little 
more,  but  is  punctilious  about  the  eighth.  Now  we  saw 
that  Chaucer's  practice,  in  stanza  which  also  has  a  couplet 
ending,  probably  had  much  to  do  with,  and  was  certainly 
followed  by,  his  adoption  of  the  couplet  alone.  In 
Fairfax's  case  the  follower  (save  in  the  small  degree 
noted)  was  not  himself;  but  the  process  was  the 
same. 

Moreover,  it  so  happened  that  Fairfax,  by  choice  or 
insensibly,  fell  into  a  mould  of  line  and  couplet  which 
was  much  closer  to  the  stopped  antithetic  ridge-backed 
variety  of  this  latter  than  anything  in  Chaucer.  A  selection 
below,2  beginning  with  the  very  second  stanza  of  the 
poem,  will  show  this  ;  but  there  has  been  no  need  to  select 
the  specimens  with  any  care,  for  they  are  not  the 
exception,  but  the  rule.  There  can  be  little  doubt  of  the 

1  The  edition  just  cited  of  Daemonologia,  includes  some  eclogues  of  his 
own  in  sixain  with  final  couplet ;  the  others  are  in  continuous  couplet,  though 
partly  batched  in  fours. 

2  If  fictions  light  I  mix  with  Truth  Divine 
And  fill  these  lines  with  other  praise  than  Thine. 

i.  2. 

We  further  seek  what  their  offences  be  : 
Guiltless  I  quit ;  guilty  I  set  them  free. 

ii.  52. 

Thro"  love  the  hazard  of  fierce  war  to  prove, 
Famous  for  arms,  but  famous  more  for  love. 

iii.  40. 

In  fashions  wayward,  and  in  love  unkind, 
For  Cupid  deigns  not  wound  a  currish  mind. 

iv.  46. 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  277 

effect  which  they — so  early,  let  it  be  remembered,  as 
1600 — must  have  produced  on  ears  which,  as  we  see 
from  the  result,  were  ready  to  hear.  There  can  be  less 
of  that  which  this  couplet,  combined  with  a  diction  more 
modern  than  Spenser's,  not  by  ten  years  but  by  nearly 
a  hundred,  must  have  had  on  later  generations  who 
did  not  mind  modernised  romance,  or  rather  preferred 
it.  For  this  very  reason  Fairfax  may  not  be  very 
refreshing  now  to  some  palates,  which  have  no  objec- 
tion to  Dryden  or  Pope,  and  which  never  weary  of 
Spenser,  but  which  do  not  care  greatly  for  a  watery 
compromise. 

It  is  specially  desirable  to  dwell  a  little  on  his  diction 
as  well  as  on  his  line,  because  we  shall  see  that  this  is 
a  very  important  element  in  the  birth  and  progress  of  the 
stopped  couplet  itself.  It  cannot  away  with  the  slow, 
gorgeous,  heavily  vowelled  tone  and  rhythm  of  the  older 
vocabulary  ;  it  wants  neat,  curt,  sharp  locutions — colours 
which  may  be  bright,  but  which  must  be  decided  and 
definitely  contrasted,  not  iridescent  or  vaguely  nuanced. 
Now  Fairfax  gives  it  what  it  wants.  Poor  Collins's 
malady  was  indeed  an  amabilis  insania  when  it  persuaded 
him  that  Fairfax  and  his  "  magic  wonders "  were  in 
perfect  harmony.  There  is  a  great  deal  more  of  prose 
and  sense  in  Fairfax's  numbers,  and  likewise  in  his  phrase, 
than  of  "  magic." 

The  demand  to  which  this  answered  was  put  remark-  Sir  John 
ably  by  another  Jacobean  poet,  Sir  John  Beaumont,  in  a  Beaumont- 
poem  to  the  King  "  Concerning  the  True  Form  of  English 
Poetry."  This  is,  in  fact,  Sir  John's  principal  title  to  an 
appearance  here,  though  it  is  not  always  mentioned  in 
accounts  of  him.  It  is  unlucky  that  we  do  not  know  the 
exact  date  of  the  piece  ;  but  as  it  was  addressed  "  to  his 
late  Majesty  James  I."  it  can  hardly  be  later,  and  may 
be  much  earlier,  than  the  earliest  date  that  can  possibly 
be  claimed  for  the  writing  of  Waller's  "  Santander  "  lines 
(v.  inf.),  while  it  must  be  years  earlier  than  the  appearance 
of  those  lines.  The  actual  form  of  its  couplets  is  note- 
worthy, but  the  sense  conveyed  in  it  is  much  more  so. 


278     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

Sir  John,  speaking  as  to  an  expert  in  prosodic  precept,1 
does  not  indeed  say  in  so  many  words  that  the  stopped 
couplet  is  the  master  metre,  but  this  is  evidently  the  sum 
and  substance  of  what  he  means  ;  and  if  Pope  had  known 
the  lines  at  the  time  when  he  wrote  the  Essay  on  Criticism 
he  would  probably  have  stolen  them,  or  some  of  them. 
First,  the  author  of  Bosworth  Field  stigmatises  "  the  other 
fellows  "- 

On  halting  feet  the  ragged  poem  goes 

With  accents  neither  fitting  verse  nor  prose — 

a  couplet  for  which  his  contemporary  and  "  father "  Ben 
would  have  hugged  him,  as  the  later  Johnson  felt  inclined 
to  do,  even  to  his  enemy  Adam  Smith,  when  he  heard 
of  his  love  for  "rhyme."  Indeed,  after  glancing  disdain- 
fully at 

Holes  where  men  may  thrust  their  hands  between, 

Sir  John  goes  on — 

The  relish  of  the  Muse  consists  in  rhyme  : 
One  verse  must  meet  another  like  a  chime. 
Our  Saxon  shortness  hath  peculiar  grace 
In  choice  of  words  fit  for  the  ending-place, 
Which  leave  impression  in  the  mind  as  well 
As  closing  sounds  of  some  delightful  bell. 

Not  merely  Johnson  but  the  austere  Bysshe  himself 
would  have  applauded  the  sentiment — 

In  many  changes  these  may  be  expressed  : 
But  those  that  join  most  simply  run  the  best ; 
Their  form,  surpassing  far  the  fettered  staves, 
Vain  care  and  needless  repetition  saves. 

And  Mr.  Addison  and  Mr.  Pope,  nay  their]' leader  the 
great  M.  Boileau-Despreaux,  contemptuous  as  \  he  was  of 
all  things  English,  would  have  acclaimed  and  laurelled 
the  man  who  in  the  depths  of  "  the  last  age  "  dared  to 
write  in  praise  of 

Pure  phrase,  fit  epithets,  a  sober  care 
Of  metaphors,  descriptions  clear  yet  rare. 

1  See  the  "  Prosodists  "  chapter  of  the  last  Book. 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  279 

It  is  not  surprising  that  Mr.  Courthope  l  should  describe 
this  "  as  an  exact  and  critical  conception  of  the  nature  of 
the  poetic  art,"  and  should  say  that  "  a  more  admirable 
illustration  of  the  classical  spirit  naturalised  in  English 
verse  is  not  to  be  found  in  the  range  of  English  poetry." 
Substitute  "  neo-classic  "  for  "  classical  "  and  I  should  say 
ditto  to  my  friend  very  cheerfully. 

Beaumont  practised  what  he  preached  very  fairly,  but, 
unlike  Waller  (who,  indeed,  was  considerably  his  junior), 
he  could  manage  the  "  stave  "  without  "  fettering  "  it,  and 
could  show  something  of  the  powers  which  it  has,  beyond 
those  of  what  might  be  more  truly  called  the  "  fettered  " 
couplet.  But  he  hardly  deserved  addition  to  the  list  of 
poets  in  the  third  chapter  of  the  last  Book.  Here  his 
place  is  undeniable.2 

If  Beaumont  has  often  been  defrauded  of  his  due  Sandys. 
place  among  the  vaunt-couriers  of  the  stopped  couplet, 
and  if  Drummond  has  been  promoted  a  little  hastily, 
another  traditional  pioneer,  George  Sandys,  is  perhaps 
again  questionable,  not  so  much  in  point  of  quality  as  of 
date.  With  the  odd  fatality  which  seems  to  hang  about 
the  chronology  of  this  couplet,  the  exact  appearance  of 
his  translation  of  Ovid's  Metamorphoses  is  uncertain.  It 
seems  to  have  been  published  in  1621,  within  the  reign 
of  James,  and  the  usually  accurate  and  trustworthy 
Haslewood  describes  a  copy.  But  there  is  nothing 
in  the  British  Museum  earlier  than  the  next  edition  of 
1626  —  Caroline,  not  Jacobean;  and  Sandys's  other 
couplet  work — Paraphrases  of  Job,  of  Jeremiah,  etc. —  is 
distinctly  later,  while  he  certainly  revised  the  Ovid  very 
carefully  in  1632.  But  these  are  not  matters  of  much 
importance  ;  and,  once  more,  the  position  which  Dryden 
assigns  to  Sandys  is  of  itself  important  enough.  Any- 

1  History  of  English  Poetry,  iii.  197  sqq.     The  poem  itself  may  be  found  in 
Chalmers,  vi.  30,  31.     Of  Beaumont's  other  pieces,  Bosworth  Field  is  couplet ; 
but  he  has  some  good    stanzas   in   an    Ode  of  the  Blessed  Trinity,  which 
perhaps  had   some   influence  on   Milton's  "Nativity,"  in   6,6,6,6,10,12, 
abbaba,  and  in  an  Epithalamium,  10,  6,  12,  10,  8,  14,  abbaab. 

2  Mr.   Courthope  would  bracket   Drummond  with  him  ;    but   I  scarcely 
think  Drummond  so  far  advanced. 


28o      LA  TER  JA  CO  BE  A  N  &  CAROLINE  POE  TR  Y    BOOK  vi 

body,  however,  who  turns  to  Sandys's  actual  work  (it 
should  be  said  that  the  Ovid  is  not  included  in  the 
standard  modern  edition,  that  of  the  Rev.  R.  Hooper  in 
the  Library  of  Old  Authors}  will  see  at  once  that,  though 
he  may  have  a  strong  nisus  towards  the  stopped  form — 
a  nisus  perhaps  originally  determined  by  his  anxiety  to 
represent  Ovid  as  much  line  for  line  as  possible, — he  is 
under  no  preceptist  scruples  in  his  methods,  and  does 
not  always  attain  any  very  great  smoothness  in  his 
results,  though  he  sometimes  does.  Enjambment  is  quite 
frequent,  and  the  pause  is  varied  almost  as  freely  as  in 
blank  verse.  But  there  is  certainly  a  hammer-stroke  of 
emphasis  in  him  which  does  foretell  Dryden.1 
The  first  main  Waller  occupies — or  has  by  turns  occupied  and  been 
served  with  notice  to  quit — a  place  of  such  importance 
in  prosodic  history  that,  especially  as  his  volume  is  not 
great,  we  may  consider  all  his  verse  here  under  the  head 
of  the  metre  which  gained  him  his  distinction.  I  do 
not  propose  to  take  up  much  space  with  "  verifying  his 
powers "  or  discussing  his  title.  There  is,  in  fact,  too 
much  of  the  gold-and-silver  shield  business  about  the 
discussion  to  make  it  a  profitable  one.  More  than  half 
the  modern  readers  who  are  indignant  with  "  Waller  was 
smooth "  are  so  because  their  ideal  of  smoothness  and 
Pope's  or  Johnson's  are  two  quite  different  things.  And 
as  there  seems  to  be  no  means  of  ascertaining  exactly 
when  such  pieces  as  the  "  Santander  "  poem  were  written, 
it  skills  very  little  to  produce  such  and  such  a  verse,  or 

1  Compare  the  openings  of  Job  I.  and  II. — 

In  Hus,  a  land  which  near  the  sun's  uprise 

And  northern  confines  of  Sabsea  lies, 

A  great  example  of  perfection  reigned, 

His  name  was  Job,  his  soul  with  guilt  unstained. 

Again  when  all  the  radiant  sons  of  light 
Before  His  throne  appeared,  Whose  only  sight 
Beatitude  infused  ;  the  Inveterate  Foe, 
In  fogs  ascending  from  the  depth  below. 
Profaned  their  blest  assembly. 

Sandys's  prosodic  interest  is  not  limited  to  the  couplet.  The  metres  of  his 
Psalm  Paraphrases  are  varied,  and  include  several  examples  of  the  In 
Mcmoriam  quatrain. 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  281 

such  and  such  verses,  of  Beaumont,  Drummond,  Fairfax, 
and  others  back  to  Drayton,  or  (as  can  be  done)  Spenser 
himself,  which  have  the  Wallerian  quality.  It  can  be 
done  ;  it  has  been  done  here  ;  and  there's  an  end  of  it. 

What  is  really  important  is  that  Waller  may  certainly 
have  written  such  verses  as  these1  as  early  as  1623-24  ; 
that  these  verses  have  a  certain  quality,  and  that  this 
quality  was  what  succeeding  generations  admired  in  him, 
thought  that  he  had  mainly  discovered,  and  regarded  as 
the  standard  of  good  verse — as  what  all  verse  had  better 
be.  Let  us  see  what  this  model  actually  is. 

The  standard  of  "  smoothness,"  it  will  be  seen,  is  Characteristics 
pretty  exactly  that  which,  by  a  strange  enough  instance  ?,  smoothness." 
of  the  force  of  a  once  thoroughly  inculcated  convention, 
persons  who  honestly  think  the  poets  from  Coleridge  to 
Tennyson  much  greater  poets  than  those  from  Waller  to 
Crabbe,  still  put  in  school-books  as  the  standard  of  the 
"  regular "  heroic  couplet.  That  is  to  say,  two  lines  of 
ten  syllables  each,  with  "accents  on  the  even  places,"  a 
division  in  sound  if  not  in  sense  somewhere  about  the 
middle,  and  an  exact  but  not  identical  rhyme  at  the  end, 
are  kept  as  far  as  possible  complete  in  themselves,  without 
necessarily  borrowing  from  or  intruding  into  those  which 
precede  or  those  which  follow.  This  severance  of  the 
couplets  Waller  does  not  yet  thoroughly  observe  ;  but  he 
observes  all  the  other  rules.  He  has  no  trisyllabic  feet ; 
he  has  no  "  wrenched  accents,"  as  they  call  it.  The 
motion  of  his  metre  is  as  regular  as  that  of  a  rocking- 
horse  in  good  order  and  on  a  good  floor.  He  allows 
himself  expletives — especially  the  conjugations  of  "  do  " — 
in  a  way  which  will  soon  be  tabooed  ;  but  this  is  done  to 
attain  "  smoothness."  Further,  he  has,  by  congeniality 
of  nature,  already  attained  certain  characteristics  which, 
though  not  "  in  the  bond,"  as  a  matter  of  fact  always 

1  With  the  sweet  sound  of  this  harmonious  lay 
About  the  keel  delighted  dolphins  play ; 
Too  sure  a  sign  of  sea's  ensuing  rage 
Which  must  anon  this  royal  troop  engage  : 
To  whom  soft  sleep  seems  more  secure  and  sweet 
Within  the  town  commanded  by  our  fleet. 


282      LA  TER  JA COBBAN  &-  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

develop  themselves  in  this  sort  of  couplet,  and  are  recog- 
nised as  a  sort  of  patina  or  added  grace  in  it.  Keeping 
the  pause  as  close  to  the  middle  as  possible  naturally 
causes  a  slight  opposition,  or  antithesis,  of  motion  in  the 
two  halves,  and  this  as  naturally  invites  a  slight  antithesis 
of  sense.  Corresponding  epithets  in  the  two  halves  help 
this  antithesis  very  much,  and  they  duly  make  their 
appearance  ;  while  the  same  want  which  suggests  the 
expletive  verb  also  suggests  the  expletive  epithet.  Lastly, 
not  to  make  too  great  a  breach,  too  great  a  rupture  of 
smoothness,  between  the  lines,  the  rhymes  are  chosen  with 
as  little  echo  and  depth  in  them  as  possible  :  and  even 
the  words  within  the  lines  themselves  avoid  thunderous 
and  long-drawn  sound. 

But  whatever  be  this  form's  merit  or  its  shortcomings, 
there  is  practically  no  question  but  that  Waller  had  a 
great  and  a  curiously  prospective  command  of  it.  That 
the  command  was  great,  the  example  already  quoted,  and 
almost  any  other  in  his  work,  should  sufficiently  show. 
That  it  was  mainly  a  matter  of  instinct  rather  than  of 
trained  obedience  to  rule,  a  perusal  of  his  whole  work 
will  show  quite  as  decidedly.  For  instance,  in  one  of  his 
very  latest  poems,  the  Epitaph  on  Henry  Dunch,  written 
when  Waller  was  eighty  years  old  and  about  to  follow  his 
friend  next  year,  he  not  merely  writes — 

Which,  well  observing,  he  returned  with  more 
Value  for  England  than  he  had  before — 

an  overrunning  of  the  line  which  is  quite  Chamberlaynian 
— but  overruns  the  couplet  itself  in 

A  pious  son,  a  husband,  and  a  friend. 
To  neighbours  too  his  bounty  did  extend 
So  far,  etc. 

On  the  whole,  however,  it  is  evident  that  his  genius 
prompted  him  continually  in  the  direction  of  the  smooth, 
stopped,  antithetic  couplet.  He  was,  of  course,  not  its 
Columbus ;  nobody  was.  It  was  only  an  island  lying 
off  the  inhabited  continent,  which  had  been  visited 
now  and  then,  but  never  regularly  colonised  till,  about 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  283 

his  time,  the  chief  seat  of  prosodic  civilisation  and 
government  was  transferred  to  it.  But  that  Waller  had 
as  much  to  do  as  anybody  with  the  transference  nobody 
had,  or  is  ever  likely  to  have,  better  opportunities  for 
knowing,  or  better  brains  for  judging,  than  Dryden  ;  and 
what  Dryden's  opinion  was  we  know.1 

His  prosodic  interest,  however,  is  very  far  from  being  His  other 
confined  to  the  couplet,  though,  curiously  enough,  the metres- 
remainder  of  it  has  a  bearing  also  on  this.  It  may  be 
at  first  sight  surprising,  but  only  to  those  who  have  not 
considered  the  matter,  to  find  that,  out  of  this  peculiar 
couplet,  Waller  is  by  no  means  infallibly  or  continuously 
"  smooth."  The  one  thing  of  his  that  everybody  knows, 
or  used  to  know,  "  Go,  lovely  rose,"  has,  of  course, 
nothing  that  can  be  called  harshness  about  it.  But  it  is 
not  particularly  mellifluous ;  and  among  the  abundant 
honey-pots  of  Caroline  lyric  it  is  perhaps  rather  dry  than 
sweet.  The  alternate  eights  of  "  Chloe,  yourself  you  so 
excel "  are  better,  but  not  extraordinary ;  and  I  turn  his 
lyrics  over  backwards  and  forwards,  without  being  able  to 
find  anything  that  has  the  intense,  the  almost  overpower- 
ing exquisiteness  of  music  which  belongs,  not  merely  to 
Herrick  and  Carew  and  Crashaw  and  Marvell,  but  to 
Kynaston  and  Stanley,  and  even  John  Hall.  The  best 
things  are  the  catalectic  trochaic  dimeters  of  the  Amoret 
poem,  with  the  contrasted  quatrains  2  on  Amoret  herself  and 
her  rival — in  fact,  these  last  eight  lines  are  the  best  things 
that  Waller  ever  did.  But  the  curious  thing  is  that  he 

1  The  finest  couplet  that  Waller  wrote,  and  his  most  poetical  passage, 
composed,  as  it  happened,  just  before  his  own  death — 

The  soul's  dark  cottage,  battered  and  decayed, 

Lets  in  new  light  through  chinks  which  Time  hath  made, 

is  a  good  example  of  the  yeoman's  service  that  prosody  can  do  to  poetry. 
As  a  couplet  it  is  not  out  of  the  way,  though  the  variation  of  caesura  and  the 
monosyllabic  constitution  of  the  last  line  are  noteworthy ;  but  the  effect  of 
the  thought,  which  here  is  the  chief  beauty,  is  much  enhanced  by  the  curiously 
varied  values  of  a  in  the  first  line  and  i  in  the  second. 

2  Amoret !  as  sweet  and  good 
As  the  most  delicious  food, 
Which,  but  tasted,  does  impart 
Life  and  gladness  to  the  heart. 


284     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

not  only  never  reaches  the  most  poignant  harmony,  but 
is  sometimes  capable  of  singular  discord.  Even  Johnson 
perceived  the  strange  cacophony  of  the  Puerperium?  which 
prompts  a  charitable  reader  to  ask  whether  there  is  not 
some  mistake,  whether  he  has  not  got  hold  of  a  foul  copy. 
I  suppose  it  was  written  to  music — that  fertile  source  of 
prosodic  imperfection.  But  then  a  poet  with  a  good  ear 
would  have  refused  to  write  to  this  music — would  have 
said,  "  You  must  please  make  your  music  musical  for 
verse" 

There  is  yet  another  place  where  this  excuse,  though 
bad,  will  have  to  be  replaced  by  a  worse,  and  that  is  the 
piece  cited  below.2  It  may  be  observed  that  it  is  called  a 
"  Song,"  so,  once  more,  the  reason  of  the  cacophony  may 
be  musical ;  but  it  is,  at  least,  prosodically  explicable 
(which  the  other  is  not)  on  the  ground  of  a  prosodic 
mistake.  We  know — and  Waller  doubtless  knew — how 
charmingly  the  heptasyllable,  not  merely  of  preserved 
iambic  cadence,  but  of  cadence  definitely  shifted  to 
trochaic,  adapts  itself  to  the  regular  iambic  octosyllable. 
It  is  very  improbable  that  he  did  not  know  Comus  and 
Milton's  other  minor  poems,  which  appeared  in  print 
before  his  own.  He  certainly  knew  Shakespeare's 
triumphs  in  the  measure,  and  he  could  not  be  ignorant 
of  the  more  than  successful  attempts  of  Jonson,  Browne, 
Wither,  and  others.  But  he  seems  not  to  have  noticed — 
or  noticing,  to  have  neglected — the  remarkable  fact  that  in 
all  these  cases  the  rhyme  is  continuous  and  coupleted. 

Saccharissa's  beauty's  wine 
Which  to  madness  doth  incline  : 
Such  a  liquor  as  no  brain 
That  is  mortal  can  sustain. 

1  E.g.— 

Fair  Venus  in  thy  soft  arms 
The  god  of  Rage  confine  ; 
For  thy  whispers  are  the  charms 

Which  only  can  divert  his  fierce  design. 

2  Say,  lovely  dream  !  where  could'st  thou  find 

Shades  to  counterfeit  that  face  ; 
Colours  of  this  glorious  kind 

Come  not  from  any  mortal  place. 


CHAP,  ii          THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  285 

He  endeavoured — and  the  endeavour  was  quite  justified 
as  an  experiment — to  twist  the  arrangement  and  make  the 
rhymes  alternate.  But  his  very  first  stanza  ought  to  have 
shown  him  that  this  was,  in  the  excellent  Biblical  word 
we  have  used  before,  "  confusion."  Exactly  why  the  ear 
revolts  at  this  combination  of  shifted  metre  without 
apparent  rhyme  it  might  be  difficult  to  say  ;  though  on 
some  of  the  symbolist  systems  I  daresay  it  could  be 
accounted  for  in  the  manner  which  does  not  account. 
But  the  fact  can  be  illustrated  by  another  little  experi- 
ment, curious  but  conclusive.  Shift  the  rhyme-words  to 
make  couplet  arrangement,  and,  though  the  sense  will  be 
damaged,  you  will  find  that  the  rhythm  is,  as  if  by  miracle, 
restored — 

Say,  lovely  dream  !  where  could'st  thou  find 
Shades  to  counterfeit  that  kind  ; 
Colours  of  this  glorious  face 
Come  not  from  any  mortal  place. 

I  have  made  many  curious  observations  in  the  course  of 
this  work,  but  I  do  not  know  one  which  pleases  me  more 
than  this. 

The  fact  is  (and  it  may  be  set  as  people  please  on  Their  moral  as 
either  side  of  the  account)  that  special  aptitude  and  pre- to  the  couplet- 
dilection  for  the  stopped  couplet  seems,  save  perhaps  in 
the  solitary  case  of  Dryden,  to  preclude  aptitude  for  any 
other  measure.  It  may  be  that  this  couplet  is  Aphrodite 
Urania,  and  that  he  who  loves  her  can  tolerate  no  meaner 
love.  It  may  go  more  nearly  to  be  thought  by  some  that 
an  opposite  explanation  is  correct.  Or,  without  being 
thus  personal,  it  may  be  said,  and  perhaps  most  philo- 
sophically as  well  as  most  politely,  that  the  measure  is  so 
extremely  specialised  that  tongue  and  ear  and  finger, 
once  thoroughly  subdued  to  it,  can  adapt  themselves  to  no 
other.  But  the  fact,  with  the  rule-proving  exception  of 
the  gigantic  if  not  god-like  craftsmanship  of  Dryden,  is 
the  fact.  In  Waller's  case  I  think  his  prosodic  short- 
comings account,  at  least  as  much  as  any  quality  of  his 
thought,  for  the  unsatisfactory  character  of  his  lyric. 


286      LATER  JACOBEAN  Sf  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

Compare  "  Chloris  !  farewell  "  with  Marvell's  masterpiece l 
in  the  same  stanza.  The  thought  of  the  latter  is  better, 
no  doubt ;  but  its  betterment  is  for  less  in  the  matter  than 
the  limpness  of  Waller's  measure  contrasted  with  the 
undeniable  spring  and  soar  of  Marvell's,2  or  than  the 
tameness  of  Waller's  diction  contrasted  with  the  rocket- 
scattering  quality  of  "  rare  "  in  the  place  where  it  occurs 
and  the  magnificent  bulk  and  run  of  the  single  word 
"  impossibility."  The  couplets  on  Myra,  "  The  Night 
Piece," 3  are  very  pretty  and  graceful,  and  not  much  less 
"  metaphysical "  than  the  wildest  excesses  of  Benlowes  or 
Crashaw.  But,  once  more,  both  measure  and  diction  are 
flaccid  ;  there  is  no  throb,  no  quiver,  no  explosive  and 
jaculative  quality  about  them.  In  fact,  one  feels  inclined 
to  play  on  them  the  reverse  trick  to  that  which  we  are 
going  to  play  on  Garth  and  Pope  and  expand  them  in 
decasyllabics — 

[Fell]  darkness  which  [the]  fairest  nymphs  disarms 
Defends  us  ill  from  [radiant]  Myra's  charms, 

etc.     But  this  is  too  wicked. 

Cowiey— his        Cowley  is  a  far  more  of  a  prosodic  puzzle  than  his 
curious  posi-  fellows,  Waller  and  Denham,  and  the  much  greater  bulk 

tion.  . 

of  his  work  might  seem  to  challenge  more  elaborate 
treatment  than  was  demanded  even  by  Waller.  The 
puzzle  indeed  is,  as  is  not  the  case  with  them,  one  in 
which  the  general  poetical  question  is  rather  inextricably 
mixed  up  with  the  special  or  prosodic.  Waller  had  little, 
and  Denham  had  less,  of  the  pure  poet  about  him  ;  but 
Cowiey  had  a  great  deal.  Even  Johnson  admitted  that ; 
and  yet  Johnson  might  have  been  supposed  to  be  pre- 
judiced against  Cowiey  three  or  four  times  over,  not 
merely  by  his  metaphysicality,  but  by  the  further  facts 
that  large  parts  of  his  works  are  regularly  lyrical  in  form, 

1  V.  inf.,  p.  334. 

2  Observe  that  Marvell  himself  is  not  an  exception  to  the  rule  above.     His 
lyrics  are  splendid,  but  his  couplets,  though  vigorous,  are  not  accomplished. 

3  The  poem  is  late,  but  still  too  early  for  Granville's  "  Myra,"  Lady  New- 
burgh,  the  object  of  so  much  admiration  in  her  youth  and  of  Dr.  King's 
Yahoo-like  satire  in  her  age. 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  287 

a  form  for  which  Johnson  cared  little  ;  that  he  was  the 
inventor  and  most  considerable  practitioner  of  Pindarics, 
the  irregularity  of  which  the  great  lexicographer  hated 
more  than  anything  else  ;  and  that  his  principal  couplet- 
poem,  the  Davideis,  is  sacred  in  subject  and  not  invariably 
or  excessively  smooth  in  form.  The  fact  is  that  it  is  very 
difficult  for  anybody  who  really  likes  poetry  in  any  form 
not  to  like  something  in  Cowley  ;  but  for  this  very  reason 
(or  the  counterpart  and  complement  of  it)  it  is  still  more 
difficult  for  any  one  who  has  decided  tastes  in  poetry  to 
like  Cowley  everywhere  or  very  much.  It  may  be  even 
not  mere  paradox  to  suggest  that  in  this  peculiarity  lies 
the  secret,  at  once  of  his  astonishing  popularity  for  a  time 
and  of  his  rapid  and  complete  loss  of  that  popularity. 
He  represented  all  the  tastes  of  a  time  of  transition  and 
overlapping ;  and  he  could  please  all  while  none  was 
particularly  dominant.  He  wrote  couplets  better  than 
any  "  metaphysical "  and  lyrics  much  better  than  any  of 
the  new  couplet  poets  ;  while  he  provided  in  his  Pindarics 
an  escape  for  those  who  found  the  couplet  too  monotonous 
and  the  lyrics  too  fantastic.  He  did  serve  many 
masters — with  success  as  long  as  one  master  had  not 
definitely  got  the  mastery.  But  when  this  happened  he 
went  down  ;  and  when,  long  afterwards,  the  strong  man 
had  to  give  way  to  a  stronger,  he  did  not  come  up  again. 

This  not  exactly  Laodicean  but  in  some  respects  His  couplet 
"  trimming "  temperament  is  as  noticeable  in  him — has  geni 
indeed,  by  allusion  and  glance,  been  already  shown  to  be 
as  noticeable — in  true  prosodic  respects  as  in  regard  of 
subject  and  of  other  matters.  Cowley's  couplet,  which, 
let  it  be  remembered,  is  not,  like  some  others,  open  to  any 
chronological  scepticism,  is  an  interesting  study.  In  his 
Juvenile  Poems,  published  when  he  was  fifteen,  in  1633, 
the  year  before  Comus,  they  only  appear  in  the  closing 
distichs  of  the  sixains  of  Constantia  and  Philetus,  etc. 
But  Sylva  (three  years  later,  and  a  year  before  Lycidas) 
is  full  of  them.  They  exhibit  a  much  less  definitely 
stopped  form  than  those  of  Waller's  probably,  and  Beau- 
mont's certainly,  ten  years'  older  attempts  ;  and  are  some- 


288      LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

times  frankly  enjambed.  In  them  sometimes,  and  in  other 
pieces  often,  the  boy-poet  (he  was  still  only  eighteen) 
succumbs  to  the  worst  fault  of  the  time — a  fault  which  the 
pure  stopped  couplet  (to  do  it  justice)  did  discourage — 
the  fault  of  apostrophation  without  the  possibility  of 
elision  or  of  a  harmonious  trisyllabic  foot,  as  thus — 

By  calling  th'  Pope  the  Whore  of  Babylon, 

where  you  certainly  can  apply  a  remedy  worse  than  the 
disease  by  reading  "  the  Pope  "  and  "  th'ore."  But  this 
is  not  in  a  couplet. 

Nor  can  it  be  said  that  Cowley  ever  gave  himself  up 
entirely,  or  mainly,  to  Wallerian  "  smoothness."  He 
could  and  did  attain  it  towards  the  end  of  his  life :  but 
it  is  evident  that  he  never  fell  into  the  groove  in  which 
it  is  practically  impossible  for  a  man  not  to  give  it.  And 
the  verse  of  his  Davideis  deserves  a  brief  study. 

The  Davideis.  The  Davideis  is  one  of  those  poems  in  dealing  with 
which  it  is  rather  common  for  critics  to  lament  the  rarity 
with  which  it  is  read,  and  then  to  insinuate  reasons 
why  people  should  think  twice  or  thrice  before  reading  it. 
I  have  read  it  myself  more  than  once,  and  I  can  see  no 
reason  why  anybody,  who  does  not  read  "  for  the  subject " 
only,  should  not  follow  my  example.  From  that  point 
of  view  it  has  the  inevitable  drawback  of  sacred  narrative 
verse,  that  the  main  story  is  known,  and  that  the  teller's 
ekings  of  it  can  hardly  interest,  and  may  possibly  displease. 
But  this  does  not  concern  us.  What  does  concern  us  is 
to  determine  whether  Cowley  was  justified  in  the  rather 
rash  and  not  very  modest  boast,  made  in  good  lines 
towards  the  beginning — 

Lo !  this  great  work,  a  temple  to  thy  praise, 
On  polished  pillars  of  strong  verse  I  raise. 

Certainly  not  over-modest,  and  as  certainly  rather  rash. 
But,  as  it  happens,  the  couplet  which  comes  immediately 
before  this — 

From  earth's  vain  joys,  and  Love's  soft  witchcraft  free, 
I  consecrate  my  Magdalene  to  thee, 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  289 

is  something  of  a  justification.  Indeed,  there  is  a  note 
in  it  far  above  the  mere  tick-tick  of  Waller,  and  antici- 
pating to  no  small  extent  the  resounding  line  of  Dryden 
himself,  who,  beyond  all  doubt,  paid  in  his  youth  much 
attention  to  Cowley.  Nor  is  the  whole  paragraph  which 
introduces  these  lines  much  less  worthy  of  study. 

And  the  qualities  here  found  are  frequent  throughout 
the  poem.  "  Strong  lines  "  (to  use  his  own  words,  both 
in  and  out  of  connection  with  Walton's  well-known  ob- 
servation) abound  ;  strong  couplets  hardly  less  ;  strong 
passages  of  no  inconsiderable  bulk  could  be  produced  in 
plenty  to  match  or  excel  that  given  just  now.  But  it  is 
clear  that  Cowley,  like  Dryden  again,  wanted,  to  show  his 
prosodic  powers,  more  room  than  the  narrow  lists  of  the 
Fairfaxian-Wallerian  couplets  could  give  him.  He  soon 
expatiates  into  the  Alexandrine.  An  early  instance  is — 

And  overruns  the  neighbouring  fields  with  violent  course. 

There  is  no  doubt  that,  whatever  the  tyranny  of  regularity 
may  order,  this  expatiation  does  give  to  the  couplet  a 
liberty,  and  at  the  same  time  a  majesty,  which  are 
unobtainable  without  it.  And  Johnson,  had  another  man 
said  it,  would  have  been  the  first  to  find  this  demurrer  to 
his  own  argument,  "  I  cannot  discover  why  the  pine l  is 
taller  in  an  Alexandrine  than  in  ten  syllables."  Indeed, 
he  hastens  to  supply  the  demurrer  himself  by  saying  of 
the  other  line — 

Which  runs,  and,  as  it  seems,  for  ever  shall  run  on, 

that  it  is  "  an  example  of  representative  versification  which 
perhaps  no  other  English  line  can  equal."  If  you  may 
do  "  representative  versification  "  in  water,  why  may  you 
not  do  it  in  wood  ? 

On  the  other  hand,  Johnson  is  certainly  right  in  part> 
and  no  small  part,  when  he  says  that  Cowley's  versifica- 

1  In  this  very  line — 

Like  some  fair  pine  o'erlooking  all  the  ignoble  wood — 

it  is  astonishing  that  Johnson  should  have  overlooked  the  overlooking  of  ten 
syllables  by  twelve. 

VOL.  II  U 


290     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

tion  is  sometimes  harsh  to  modern  ears.  The  line  which 
Cowley  himself  thought  might  require  justification  to  the 
most  part  of  readers  1 — 

Nor  can  the  glory  contain  itself  in  th'  endless  space, 

requires  it  still,  and  will  find  it  very  difficult  to  get. 
That  there  was  something  wrong  with  his  own  ears,  or 
his  own  principles,  is  evident  from  the  fact  that  he  thinks 
this  plea  of  "  representative  versification "  will  cover  it, 
and  alleges  among  his  parallels  the  very  line  we  gave 
above,  "  And  overruns,"  etc.,  which  is  perfectly  unob- 
jectionable, and  another — 

Down  a  precipice,  deep  down,  he  casts  them  all, 

which  is,  if  anything,  rather  worse  than  "  Nor  can  the 
glory." 

His  own  This  doctrine  of  sound  to  suit  sense  never  lost  its 
principles.  ^Q}^  even  when  Cowley  himself  was  slighted,  and  it  will 
meet  us  often.  It  is  obviously  of  very  limited  validity — 
at  best  a  beggarly  element  of  the  great  doctrine  of  verbal 
and  specially  vowel  music ;  while,  applied  as  Cowley 
applies  it,  it  ignores  a  far  higher  law,  the  necessity  under 
which  metre  lies  of  conforming  to  its  own  nature. 

In  fact,  no  theory  of  foot  or  accent  will  save  the  bad 
lines  quoted.      In  particular,  on  our  principles  at  least — 

Down  a  precipice,  deep  down,  he  casts  them  all, 

commits  the  very  worst  fault  that  verse  can  commit,  that 
of  suggesting  a  different  rhythm  and  line-base  from  that 
which  was  intended.  Had  I  seen  this  verse  without  its 
context,  I  should  have  supposed  it  to  be  one  of  the  rough 
but  fairly  marked  anapaestic  lines  which  were  then  just 
coming  in — 

Down  a  prejcipice,  deep  |  down,  he  casts  |  them  all. 

1  His  words  are  :  "  I  am  sorry  that  it  is  necessary  to  admonish  the  most 
part  of  readers,  that  it  is  not  by  negligence  that  this  verse  is  so  loose,  long, 
and,  as  it  were,  vast :  it  is  to  paint  in  the  number,  the  nature  of  the  thing 
which  it  describes  .  .  .  The  thing  is  that  the  disposition  of  words  and 
numbers  should  be  such  as  that,  out  of  the  order  and  sound  of  them,  the  things 
themselves  may  be  represented. 


CHAP,  ii          THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  291 

These  things  occur  far  too  often  in  the  Davideis ;  but 
they  occur  side  by  side  with  others,  which,  in  a  sort  of 
incult  luxuriance,  have  very  considerable  beauty.  Nor  is 
it  quite  obvious  why  Johnson  so  greatly  preferred  the 
lines  on  Crashaw's  death,  which,  fine  as  they  are,1  are 
not  finer  than  many  of  the  Davideis  passages,  and  ex- 
hibit very  much  the  same  liberties  from  the  Johnsonian 
point  of  view  of  versification.  The  Alexandrine,  at  any 
rate,  is  in  constant  evidence  here. 

It  is  characteristic  of  that  contradictory  quality  which  His  lyrics. 
we  have  noted  in  Cowley  that  he  is  not  merely  inclined 
to  eccentricity  in  the  couplet  and  to  regularity  in  lyric — 
we  noticed  this,  too,  in  his  far  greater  master,  Donne — 
but  that  he  is  on  the  whole  more  timid  in  his  diction  ex- 
actly when  he  has  the  instrument  that  generally  tempts 
to  audacity.  He  is  certainly  very  much  more  of  a  singer 
than  Waller  ;  but  he  is  seldom  "  nobly  wild."  His  most 
popular  and  perhaps  his  best  thing — the  well-known 
"  Chronicle  "  of  what  we  do  not  need  biographers  to  tell  us 
were  almost  to  a  certainty  imaginary  loves — is  of  absolute 
prosodic  adequacy  :  it  runs  with  a  light,  bright,  regular 
insincerity  which  leaves  nothing  to  desire  in  its  own 
particular  fashion.  Nor  does  he  ever,  as  we  have  shown 
that  Waller  does,  choose  positively  unsuccessful — perhaps 
positively  illegitimate — measures.  But  some  of  his  also 
are  not  very  happy.  Here  is  one  which  he  uses  more 
than  once — 

Why,  O,  doth  sandy  Tagus  ravish  thee, 
Though  Neptune's  treasure  house  it  be  ? 
Why  doth  Pactolus  thee  bewitch, 
Infected  yet  with  Midas;  glorious  itch  ? 

Ode  II. 

where  the  two  shorter  and  central  lines  should  certainly 
rhyme,  or  else  the  line  -  lengths  should  be  differently 
adjusted.  Two  other  forms  (v.  inf.  Odes  IV.  and  V.)  are 

1  The  whole  piece,  being  short,  is  perhaps  the  best  place  to  study  the 
Cowleian  couplet  for  those  who  blench  from  the  Davideis,  and  it  starts  with — 

Poet  and  saint !   to  thee  alone  are  given 

The  two  most  sacred  names  of  Earth  and  Heaven. 


292      LATER  JACOBEAN  fr  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

much  better ;  but  they  are  still  rather,  to  use  the  old 
fable,  clay  birds  prettily  moulded  than  the  same  made 
alive.  His  very  favourite  octave  of  couplets  in  varying 
line-length  is  sometimes  better.  But  both  in  these  and 
in  others  he  too  often  reminds  us  of  that  frightful  vision 
of  Guest's  (more  terrible  far  than  the  much -talked -of 
Lucretian  nightmare  of  the  homeless  atoms  sleeting  in 
the  void)  of  a  poet  sitting  down  to  try  all  possible 
"  sections  " — and  not  rejecting  those  which  are  unsuccess- 
ful. Another  curious  pair  of  metres  illustrating  the  way 
in  which  he  will  keep  both  a  bad  creation  and  a  good 
one  will  be  found  below.1 

Perhaps  as  successful  as  any  are  his  schemes  for  the 
elegy  on .  William  Hervey,  and  the  version  of  Horace's 
Pyrrha,  which  contains  some  very  pleasant  things — not 
so  plain  in  their  neatness  as  Milton's,  but  daintily  decked 
enough.  He  has  not  lost  the  gift  of  the  earlier  century 
in  trochaics  ;  his  Anacreontics  include  many  well-known, 
and  deservedly  well  -  known,  pieces ;  and  the  infinite 
variety  of  metre  in  the  Mistress  cannot,  in  such  hands, 
fail  sometimes  to  be  charming.  Perhaps  the  finest 
measure  of  all,  the  opening  of  "  The  Change,"  2  is  merely 
a  modification,  in  the  last  line,  of  the  old  sixain.  But 

1  Here's  to  thee,  Dick  ;  this  whining  love  despise. 
Pledge  me,  my  friend  ;  and  drink  till  thou  be'st  wise. 
It  sparkles  brighter  far  than  she, 
'Tis  pure  and  bright  without  deceit ; 
And  such  no  woman  e'er  will  be. 
No  :  they  are  all  sophisticate. 

When  chance  or  cruel  business  parts  us  two, 

What  do  our  souls,  I  wonder,  do  ? 

Whilst  sleep  does  our  dull  bodies  tie, 

Methinks  at  home  they  should  not  stay, 

Content  with  dreams,  but  boldly  fly 
Abroad  and  meet  each  other  half  the  way. 

2  Love  in  her  sunny  eyes  does  basking  play ; 
Love  walks  the  pleasant  mazes  of  her  hair  ; 
Love  does  on  both  her  lips  for  ever  stray, 
And  sows  and  reaps  a  thousand  kisses  there  : 
In  all  her  outward  parts  Love's  always  seen  ; 
But  oh  !  he  never  went  within. 

The  second  and  fourth  stanzas  contract  lines  2  and  4,  and  expand  6. 


CHAP,  ii          THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  293 

that  of  "  Platonic  Love "  is  very  effective,1  and  the 
irregularly  observed  form  of  "  Called  Inconstant "  might 
be  still  more  so,  if  Cowley's  phrasing,  never  a  thing 
much  to  be  depended  on,  had  not  failed  him.  He  returns 
here  frequently  to  his  beloved  ugliness  of  enclosed  short 
lines  that  do  not  rhyme  together.  On  the  whole,  he  is 
rather  unsuccessful  in  making  his  new  schemes  "  run  "  ; 
and  it  is  no  small  relief  to  come — as  in  the  famous  piece 
which  yields  the  hackneyed  but  still  admirable 

The  adorning  thee  with  so  much  art — 

upon  old  ones. 

But  one  must  not  be  too  hard  on  a  courageous 
experimenter ;  and  the  greatest  of  Cowley's  experiments, 
his  "  Pindaric,"  has  yet  to  be  noticed  elsewhere.  Still, 
on  the  whole,  one  should,  prosodically  as  otherwise, 
correct  a  little  that  sentence  of  Rochester's  which  so 
shocked  Dryden's  propriety.  It  is  not  true  that  Cowley 
was  "  not  of  God  "  ;  but  he  was  not  quite  sufficiently  of 
God.  There  was  too  much  wood,  hay,  and  stubble 
mixed  with  his  nobler  materials  ;  and  in  some  cases  even 
the  fire  of  time  will  not  burn  these  out  and  let  the  nobler 
things  remain  in  literature. 

Sir  John  Denham  does  not  require  much  notice.  Denham. 
There  is  no  need  to  quarrel  with  the  praise  which  Dryden 
bestowed  upon  the  famous  passage2  known  to  everybody, 
and  about  the  only  thing  that  anybody,  except  a  very 
few  persons,  does  know  of  its  author's.  Nor  is  it  really 
of  much  moment  that  this  passage  was  not  in  the  original 
edition  of  Cooper's  Hill.  The  maxim  of  "  Saint  Archi- 
triclin "  (as  the  early  mediaevals  beatified  "  the  ruler  of 

1  Indeed  I  must  confess, 
When  souls  mix,  'tis  an  happiness  ; 
But  not  complete  till  bodies  too  combine, 
And  closely  as  our  minds  together  join  : 
But  half  of  Heaven  the  souls  in  glory  taste 
Till  by  love,  in  Heaven  at  last, 
Their  bodies  too  are  placed. 

The  last  three  lines  rhyme  in  seventeenth-century  English,  and  the  triplet 
is  essential. 

2  O  could  I  flow,  etc. 


294     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

the  feast ")  is  not  binding  upon  the  poet.  He  may 
produce  his  wine  in  what  order  of  merit  pleases  him  ; 
though  if  it  pleases  him  not  to  produce  "  that  which  is 
worse"  at  all,  so  much  the  better.  But  what  is  worth 
our  notice  is,  that,  prosodically,  this  passage  matches  rather 
ill  with  the  context  in  which  it  was  set.  Still,  the  whole 
is  of  very  fair  couplet  standard,  as  are  Denham's  poems 
generally.  He  is  a  little  happier  than  Waller  in  his  lyric 
metres,  chiefly  for  the  reason  that  he  seldom  or  never 
attempts  impassioned  verse,  and  that  the  step  from  the 
more  or  less  flippant  couplet  to  the  wholly  flippant  "  verse 
of  society  "  is  no  wide  one.  Very  good  in  its  way  is  the 
last  stanza  of  "  Mr.  Killigrew's  Return  "  l  and  the  first  of 
the  version  of  Martial's  most  graceless  epigram.2  The 
octosyllabic  triplets  of  "  Friendship  "  and  "  Single  Life,"  and 
the  couplets  of  the  Cowley  epitaph,  are  also  very  good  ; 
especially  the  latter,  which  are  very  sound  criticism  in 
excellent  verse.3  But  they  are  nothing  out  of  the  way 
prosodically ;  nor  is  anything  else  of  Denham's.  He  can 
make  a  good  "  copy  of  verses  " — a  much  better  copy  of 
verses  than  most  can  make  :  but  that  is  about  all.  He 
has  as  much  of  Dryden  on  one  side,  and  of  Prior  on  the 
other,  as  consists  with  being  in  a  very  different  class  ot 
poetry  and  prosody  from  that  which  Dryden  and  Prior 
illustrate. 

Thus,  considering  their  prosodies  not  merely  as  regards 
the  couplet,  but  generally,  we  see  that  neither  Denham 
nor  Cowley  (he,  indeed,  least  of  all),  nor  even  Waller,  was 

1  Mirth  makes  them  not  mad 

Nor  sobriety  sad. 

But  of  that  they  are  seldom  in  danger  : 
At  Paris,  at  Rome, 

At  the  Hague,  they're  at  home — 
The  good  fellow  is  nowhere  a  stranger. 

2  Prythee  die  and  set  me  free, 

Or  else  be 

Kind  and  brisk,  and  gay  like  me  : 
I  pretend  not  to  the  wise  ones, 

To  the  grave  (bis) 
Or  the  precise  ones. 

3  Our  Chaucer,  like  the  morning  star, 
To  us  discovers  day  from  far,  etc. 


CHAP,  ii          THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  295 

whole-hearted  in  practising  and  championing  the  form, 
and  that  peculiarities  discoverable  in  their  other  verse 
affected,  to  some  extent,  their  practice  here. 

Such,  however,  are  the  general  prosodic  aspects  of  the  The  opposite 

three  chief  introducers  of  the  new  form  of  verse  in  the  f0rrm ja' 

mid-seventeenth   century.       But,    meanwhile,   the   precise 

form  and  order  of  the  stopped  couplet  itself  were  being 

determined  as  such  things  often  are,  at  least  as  much  by 

Eris   as  by  Philia — by  the  competition  and  contrast  of 

a   form    and    order   entirely   different.       We    have   seen, 

repeatedly,  that  the  couplet  itself,  in  its  earlier  history, 

never  can  make  up  its  mind  which  fork  of  the  Y  to  take, 

and  is  nearly  as  often  enjambed  as  self-enclosed.     Yet 

the    recoil    from    fifteenth    and    early   sixteenth    century 

disorder  was  itself  in  favour  of  the  enclosed  variety  ;  and 

on  the  whole  ihe  tendency  of  it  during  the  last  quarter 

of  the  sixteenth  was  in  this  direction — the  direction  which 

was  to  be  finally  adopted.     But  as  soon  as  the  memory 

of   that   disorder   became  a   little  dimmed,  and  as  soon 

as    English   potts   generally  began    to   be   more   sure  of 

themselves,  and  not   to  require  such   obvious   assistance 

as  that  of  the  Ihe-stop,  the  other  kind  also  began  to  be 

largely  affected.    We  have  seen  it  in  reviewing  prosodic- 

ally  the  works  o"  poets  who  did  not  wholly  give  themselves 

up  to  it,  like   Drayton  and   Daniel ;    we  have  seen  it  in 

poets  who,  like  Browne  and  his  set,  positively  preferred 

it  in  narrative  aid  purely  poetical  poetry  ;  while  we  have 

also  seen   it  used,  with  pretty  definite  purpose,  in  satire. 

But  as  the  centiry  advanced,  it  acquired  almost  complete 

ascendency  in  >ome  cases ;    and   though  in  some,  again, 

of  these  its  peciliar  charm  was  conveyed,  the  toxic  quality 

which  that  cham  almost  implied   showed   itself  also,  and 

beyond  all  doibt  caused  the  double  reaction — to  blank 

verse  in  Miltoi's  case,  to  the  stopped  couplet  in  others. 

To  some  of  ttese  instances  we  may  now  pay  attention. 

The  chief  of  oem  are,  beyond  all   doubt,  John  Chalkhill 

or  whosoever  vas  the  author  of  Thealma  and  ClearcJius, 

Shakerley  Mamion   in   Cupid  and  Psyche,  and  William 

Chamberlayne  n  Pharonnida. 


296      LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

Chaikhiii,  If  we  accept  the  only  evidence 1  which  gives  Thealma 

to  Chalkhill,  his  precedence  follows  almost  as  a  matter  of 
course,  for  the  same  testimony  implicitly  asserts  it.     A 
person   who  was  a  "  friend  and  acquaintant  of  Edmund 
Spenser"  (ob.  1599),  and  who  was  probably  coroner  for 
Middlesex  before  1603,  could  not  well  have  written  this 
much  later  than  1610  at  the  farthest,  and  ought  to  have 
written  it  much  earlier,  for  it  is  evidently  the  work  of  a 
young  man,  saturated  with  the  Arcadia.      Its  versification, 
however,  is  quite  different  from  anything  that  we  have  so 
early ;    it    is    a    much   greater    step    in    the  direction   of 
enjambment    than    anything    in    Browne    or    in    Wither. 
Chalkhill's  verse  sentences  are  very  nearly  is  stopless  as 
Clarendon's   prose  ones,  and  very  much  less  capable  of 
being  stopped  by  a  little  charitable  and  jidicious  assist- 
ance.    At  my  first  dip  I  light  upon  a  passege  of  eighteen 
lines  (ed.  cit.  p.  417)  without  a  full  stop  eitier  at  line-end 
or  in   line-middle.      But   this   prolixity   is  of  much   less 
importance  to  the  point  than  the  way  in  vhich  Chalkhill 
treats  the  actual  ending  of  the  line.      It  is  in  this  that  the 
real  difference  of  the  two  systems  lies,     tt  is  possible  to 
run   the  two  lines  of  the  couplet  pretty  frequently  into 
each  other,  and    even    not   to   refrain    scnpulously   from 
overrunning  the  second,  without  seriously  infringing  the 
principle  of  "  stop."     This  principle  is  thit,  unless  there 
is   something    special    to   be   gained    pros>dically,   gram- 
matically, or  elsewise,  there  shall  be  a  prety  well-marked 
pause   at   the   line -end,   and   a   very   wellmarked   pause 
indeed  at  the  couplet-end.     This  may  b»  said   to  have 
been  observed  by  everybody  who  used  "riding  rhyme " 
from    Chaucer    to    Drayton ;    and,   thougl    Browne    and 
others  violate  it  without   scruple  and    wihout  attending 
to  the  proviso,  they  do  not  seem  utterly  reckless  of  it. 
Chalkhill    constantly,    Marmion    rather    l<ss    often,    and 
Chamberlayne  as  a  rule,  pay  absolutely  10  attention  to 
it — do  not  even  seem  to  know  that  it  exist. 

1  Izaak  Walton's  in  the  original  edition.  See  the  rprint  of  Singer,  or 
that  of  the  present  writer  in  the  second  volume  of  Mnor  Caroline  Poets 
(Oxford,  1906).  Cupid  and  Psyche  will  be  found  in  the  same  volume; 
Pharonnida  in  the  first. 


CHAP,  ii  THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  297 

Very  often  they  seem  to  think  no  more  of  "  the  end  of  The  constitu- 
the  line  "  than  if  they  were  writing  prose,  except  that  it  *J, 


difference 
two 


is  the  place  where  you  have  to  provide  a  rhyme.  If  they  styles. 
do  not  make  a  point  of  overrunning  it,  it  is  simply 
because  they  do  not  apparently  think  about  it  at  all. 
Nothing  stops  them  ;  nominative  can  be  separated  from 
verb,  adjective  from  substantive,  preposition  even  from 
case,  without  compunction,  and,  in  fact,  without  so  much 
as  attention  or  object.  The  result  of  this  is  that  rhyme 
assumes  quite  a  new  character.  It  is  no  longer  a  "time- 
beater  "  or  "  flapper  "  except  in  a  quite  minim  degree  :  it 
does  not  tell  you  (at  least  in  any  definite  way)  that  you 
have  come  to  the  end  of  the  line  at  all. 

This  may  seem  likely  to  be,  and  indeed  sometimes  is, 
a  source  of  rhythmical  danger  ;  but  these  poets,  to  do 
them  justice,  generally  have  the  sense  of  rhythm  pretty 
well  implanted  in  them,  and  can  manage  without  the 
staff  which  they  so  ostentatiously  refuse  to  employ  for 
its  staff-purpose.  When  this  sense  fails  them,  the  effect 
is  certainly  not  over -charming.  On  the  other  hand, 
rhyme,  which  is  not  of  its  nature  a  retiring  or  bashful 
thing,  forges  for  itself  a  quite  new  office.  It  supplies  a 
sort  of  obbligato  accompaniment  to  the  rhythm.  In  fact, 
this  couplet  at  its  best  is  rhymed  blank  verse,  possessing 
the  freedom,  the  variety,  the  absence  of  tick  and  click 
which  distinguishes  "  blanks,"  and  yet  adding  a  sort  of 
low  guitarish  accompaniment  of  rhyme-music.  The  poet 
gains  immensely  in  range  and  room  and  verge  ;  he  need 
lose  nothing  in  euphony.  But  it  would  be  exceedingly 
uncandid  to  conceal,  and  indeed  quite  hopeless  to  attempt 
to  conceal,  that  he  often  does  lose  a  good  deal. 

The   directions   of  his   loss   are   various,  and,  though  Dangers  of 
some  of  them  lead  out  of  strict  prosody,  they  all  concern  enJambment- 
us,  because  the  general   case  is  nothing  if  not  prosodic. 
To  begin  with  results  concerning  us  technically  least  but 
most  important  from  some  points  of  view,  the  looseness 
of  versification  seems  to  pass,  by  some  really  metaphysical 
fate,   into   looseness   of  grammatical    structure   first,    and 
then  into  looseness  of  story.     This  is  least  noticeable  in 


298      LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

Marmion,  who  has  a  classical  pattern  to  keep  him  straight, 
and  who  also  is  by  no  means  exclusively  given  to  enjamb- 
ment ;  it  is  much  more  noticeable  in  Chalkhill,  who  is 
very  rarely  stopped  ;  and  it  reaches  its  extreme  in 
Chamberlayne,  who,  though  he  can  manage  the  stopped 
couplet  well  enough,  and  actually  uses  it  when  he  thinks 
proper,  evidently  rejoices  and  almost  wallows  in  the 
other.  A  collection  of  instances  to  be  given  at  the  end 
of  the  chapter  may  illustrate  this,  and  the  subject  generally, 
much  better  than  mere  talking  about  it  can  do. 

There  is,  however,  another  danger,  of  a  somewhat 
different  character,  which  touches  us  more  nearly  in  its 
direct  and  downright  consequence  as  well  as  in  its  process. 
Composition  and  versification  of  this  kind  tend  to  destroy 
or  impair  the  very  thing  which  should  be  the  chief  justi- 
fication of  such  poetry — the  separate  line  and  phrase,  the 
"jewel  five  words  long,"  which  to  some  folk  is  the  rose 
of  poetry  itself.  There  is  this  danger  even  in  regard  to 
the  phrase,  though  Chamberlayne,  at  least,  constantly 
manages  to  save  that,  and  is  prodigal  of  it  beyond  almost 
all  but  the  greatest  poets.  But  even  he  is  careless  of 
giving  it  to  us  in  the  line,  or  in  definite  multiples  or 
fractions  of  the  line.  He  slops  it,  and  spills  it  about,  so 
that,  were  it  not  for  the  more  definite  rhythm,  it  might 
be  a  clause  of  the  ornater  prose.  Now,  this  cannot  be 
right.  "  Maxima  debetur  lineae  reverential l  It  is  the 
integer  of  poetry,  the  mistress  of  the  poetic  household, 
obliging  indeed,  and  serviceable,  ready  to  lend  itself  to 
any  honest  compliances,  but  not  to  be  sunk  and  con- 
founded in  a  mere  mob  of  syllables. 

In  these  two  trios — Waller,  Cowley,  Denham  ;  Chalk- 
hill,  Marmion,  Chamberlayne — the  Battle  of  the  Couplets 
can  be  seen  in  the  most  instructive  and  illustrative  manner 
possible.  You  may  take  them  as  group  against  group, 
as  individual  against  individual,  and  not  seldom  as  the 
individual  divided  against  himself.  For  this  latter  purpose 
nothing  is  more  luminous  than  the  contrast  of  Chamber- 

1  It  may  be  well  to  observe  that  I  do  not  think  the  first  syllable  of  linea 
short,  and  do  not  warrant  its  use  for  this  sense  in  classical  Latin. 


CHAP,  ii          THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  COUPLETS  299 

layne's  Pharonnida  with  his  verses  to  Charles  the  Second 
— a  contrast  which,  until  recently,  it  was  not  easy  to  make, 
for  Singer's  reprint  of  Pharonnida  did  not  include  the 
lesser  poem.  That  the  couplet,  no  matter  in  what  form, 
had  by  this  time  pretty  well  established  itself  as  the 
vehicle  of  such  addresses,  is  undoubted  ;  but  the  way  in 
which  the  very  captain  of  one  side  is  apparently  com- 
pelled to  desert  to  the  other  in  his  management  of  it  for 
this  purpose,  is  a  palmary  instance,  if  ever  there  was  one. 
A  definite  subject,  limited  space,  the  necessity  (or  at  least 
the  obvious  desirableness)  of  making  your  appeal  as 
pointed  and  your  points  as  clear  as  possible,  obviously 
get  the  better  of  all  personal  and  poetical  inclination. 
When  you  say  "  And  now  to  business,"  you  take  up  the 
stopped  form  as  you  put  on  a  business  coat,  without 
skirts  and  trimmings  and  furbelows.  The  age  at  this 
moment  was  saying  "  Now  to  business,"  and  it  took  up 
its  office  jacket  almost  as  a  matter  of  course.  It  would 
be  extremely  easy  for  the  present  writer  to  extra-illustrate 
this  chapter  from  all  sorts  of  sources,  well  and  little 
known  ;  but  for  the  general  purposes  of  this  history 
almost  enough  should  have  been  said.1 

1  I  have  not  given  many  examples  of  the  stopped  couplet,  because  it  is 
well  known  and  has  undergone  very  little  change  from  Fairfax's  Tasso  to 
Thackeray's  Timbuctoo. 

In  Africa,  a  quarter  of  the  world, 

Men's  skins  are  black,  their  locks  are  crisp  and  curled, 

sums  it  all  up.  The  enjambed  variety  is  much  less  uniform  and  much  less 
known,  and  some  specimens  of  its  seventeenth-century  form  may  be  useful : — 

The  rebels,  as  you  heard,  being  driven  hence, 

Despairing  e'er  to  expiate  their  offence 

By  a  too  late  submission,  fled  to  sea 

In  such  poor  barks  as  they  could  get,  where  they 

Roamed  up  and  down,  which  way  the  winds  did  please, 

Without  a  chart  or  compass  :  the  rough  seas 

Enraged  with  such  a  load  of  wickedness, 

Grew  big  with  billows,  great  was  their  distress ; 

Yet  was  their  courage  greater  ;  desperate  men 

Grow  valianter  with  suffering :  in  their  ken 

Was  a  small  island,  thitherward  they  steer 

Their  weather-beaten  barks,  each  plies  his  gear  ; 

Some  row,  some  pump,  some  trim  the  ragged  sails, 

All  were  employed  and  industry  prevails. 

Thealma  and  Cleanhus,  2203-2216. 


300     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY   BOOKVI 

(Note  the  final  stopped  form.) 

When  you  are  landed,  and  a  little  past 
The  Stygian  ferry,  you  your  eyes  shall  cast 
And  spy  some  busy  at  their  wheel,  and  these 
Are  three  old  women,  called  the  Destinies. 

Cupid  and  Psyche,  iii.  259-262. 

But  ere  the  weak  Euriolus  (for  he 

This  hapless  stranger  was)  again  could  be 

By  strength  supported,  base  Amarus,  who 

Could  think  no  more  than  priceless  thanks  was  due 

For  all  his  dangerous  pains,  more  beastly  rude 

Than  untamed  Indians,  basely  did  exclude 

That  noble  guest :  which  being  with  sorrow  seen 

By  Ammida,  whose  prayers  and  tears  had  been 

His  helpless  advocates,  she  gives  in  charge 

To  her  Ismander — till  that  time  enlarge 

Her  than  restrained  desires,  he  entertain 

Her  desolate  and  wandering  friend.      Nor  vain 

Were  these  commands,  his  entertainment  being 

Such  as  observant  love  thought  best  agreeing 

To  her  desires. 

Pharonnida,  IV.  iii.  243-256. 

Here  are  fourteen  lines — seven  couplets — without  so  much  as  a  comma  at 
the  end  of  any  one  of  them.  On  the  double-page  opening  from  which  they 
are  taken  at  hazard,  eighteen  lines  only  out  of  ninety-eight  are  ended  with  a 
stop  of  any  kind.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Restoration  poem  (England's 
Jubilee)  runs,  though  it  is  still  enjambed  in  a  way,  like  this  : — 

Pardon,  great  Prince,  for  all  our  offering  here, 
But  weak  discoveries  of  our  wants  appear  ; 
and 

The  giddy  rout  who  in  their  first  address 
Cried  "  Liberty  !  "  but  meant  licentiousness. 


NOTE  ON  THE  TWO   COUPLETS 

I  BELIEVE  it  may  be  not  quite  superfluous  to  draw  the  special 
attention  of  the  reader  to  the  fact  (which  I  have  not  neglected  in 
the  text  of  either  volume,  but  which  cannot  be  too  clearly  under- 
stood) that  neither  form  of  the  couplet  is  absolutely  the  elder. 
In  the  pre-Chaucerian  examples  the  tendency  is,  if  anything,  to  a 
kind  of  stop ;  and  though  Chaucer's  own  bias  is  rather  towards 
enjambment,  it  is  not  enjambment  of  the  Chamberlaynian  type. 
Moreover,  stopped  couplets  of  almost  the  stock  eighteenth- 
century  kind  may  be  found  in  Spen'ser  and  in  Shakespeare. 
The  form  is  always  pulling  both  ways  from  the  first :  and  there 
is  no  distinct  tug  over  the  line  till  the  Restoration. 


301 


CHAPTER   III 

THE    DECAY    OF    DRAMATIC    BLANK    VERSE 

Beaumont  and  Fletcher — Their  taste  for  redundance — Their  attitude 
to  their  licences — Massinger — Ford  —  Shirley — Randolph  — 
Brome — Davenport — Nabbes — Glapthorne — The  actual  debacle 
—  Suckling — Davenant — The  problem — And  its  answer — 
Further  instances — Goff  and  Cokain — Nero  and  The  Martyred 
Soldier — Rebellion — Andromana — Divers  Caroline  plays  com- 
pared with  Lusfs  Dominion. 

Beaumont  and  To  begin  a  chapter  with  the  above  heading  by  dealing 
with  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  may  seem  a  critical  eccen- 
tricity, if  not  a  critical  outrage.  And  to  begin  the  third 
chapter  of  our  Sixth  Book  with  two  writers  who  were 
dead  years  before  Chapman  and  Jonson,  themselves 
treated  in  the  second  chapter  of  the  Fifth,  may  seem 
chronologically  unpardonable.  But  I  do  not  think  that 
very  much  argument  is  necessary  to  rebut  any  of  these 
charges.  The  constant  caution  given  here  as  to  over- 
lapping should  dispose  of  the  second  ;  and  as  far  as  the 
first  is  concerned,  "  I  am,"  as  Mr.  Titmarsh  would  say, 
prepared  "  to  construe  anybody  any  day "  in  Beaumont 
and  Fletcher,  or  in  admiration  of  them. 

There  is,  in  fact,  no  doubt  that  in  any  well-arranged 
bird's-eye  view  of  literary  history,  with  a  special  prosodic 
outlook,  they  must  appear  as  the  first  noteworthy  ex- 
amples of  that  "  unscrewing "  of  dramatic  blank  verse 
which  led,  before  long,  to  the  break-up  of  its  whole 
structure  as  a  dramatic  medium,  and  from  which  it 
required  no  less  force  than  Milton's  to  rescue  it  as  a 
vehicle  of  narrative.  We  have  seen  that  Shakespeare 

302 


CHAP,  in    DEC  A  Y  OF  DRAMATIC  BLANK  VERSE  303 

himself,  whose  death  almost  exactly  coincided  with 
Beaumont's,  and  who  may  have  worked  with  the  pair  at 
The  Two  Noble  Kinsmen,  had  in  his  own  later  plays 
eased  the  screws  very  freely,  and  rather  hazardously  in 
appearance.  But,  then,  Shakespeare  was  such  an  absolute 
tregetour  with  blank  verse,  that  he  could  make  the  rocks 
of  its  Brittany  vanish  as  easily  as  he  could  bestow  a 
sea-coast  on  its  Bohemia.  And  if  we  could  be  quite  sure, 
as  we  nearly  may  be,  that  The  Tempest  is  his  absolutely 
last  play,  and  so  later  than  Cymbeline  and  The  Winters 
Tale,  there  would  be  good  reasons  for  thinking  that  he 
had  seen  some  danger  in  his  penultimate  practice,  and, 
while  not  in  the  least  giving  up  the  advantages  of  redund- 
ance, had  determined  to  guard  against  its  disadvantages. 

For  the  "  twins,"  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  clear  either  Their  taste  for 
that  the  practice  had  no  terrors,  or  that  they  determined  redundance- 
to  brave  them.     The  prominence  of  redundance,  whether 
in  the  plays  ascribed  to  Fletcher  alone,  to  those  ascribed 
to  the  pair,  or  in  those  ascribed  to  Fletcher  and  some 
collaborator  other   than    Beaumont,1    is   so   much   of  an 
accepted     fact,    that    it    is    unnecessary    to    waste    upon 
proving    it    space   which   we    here   want    for   things   not 
generally  accepted.2 

Enough,  perhaps,  has    been    said    in   the  chapter  on  Their  attitude 
Shakespeare   on    the    almost    inevitable    danger    of   this  f 
practice.       But    what    is    extremely    noticeable    is     that 
Beaumont  and   Fletcher,  luxuriating  thus  in  one  of  the 
great  blank-verse  licences,  appear  either  not  to  feel  the 

1  I  was  rebuked  twenty  years  ago  for  declining  to  enter  into  this  question 
of  distribution  in  my  History  of  Elizabethan  Literatiire.     I  am  afraid  that 
frequent  reading  and  study,  including  the  task  of  editing  the  text  of  one  play, 
Rule  a   Wife  and  Have  a   Wife,  in   the  most  minute  and   careful   fashion 
possible,  has  left  me  impenitent  and  of  the  same  opinion  still — that  distri- 
bution is  impossible. 

2  Here  are  a  few  arithmetical  facts.     In  Philaster's  last  speech  before  the 
revolution  at  the  end  of  the  play  named  after  him,  there  are  twelve  redund- 
ances in   twenty-eight   lines  ;  in  Qesar's  magnificent  lament  for   The  False 
One  (perhaps  the  greatest  thing  in  the  whole  vast  work),  striking  out  the 
two  awkward  interruptions  of  Antony  and  Dolabella,  there  are  twenty-nine 
lines,  of  which  all  but  ten  are  redundant ;  in  Aspasia's  picture-piece  at  the 
end  of  the  Second  Act  of  The  Maid's  Tragedy  there  are  eighteen  lines  and 
eight  redundances.     But  one  need  not  take  sledge-hammers  to  doors  that 
are  open. 


304     LATER  JACOBEAN  fr  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

need  of  the  other,  or  purposely  to  abstain  from  it.  They 
have  trisyllabic  feet,  of  course,  but  in  comparison  with 
Shakespeare's  these  are  few.  Nor  are  they  very  fond  of 
Alexandrines,  though  these  also  do  occur.  On  the  other 
hand — and  it  is  the  great  merit  of  their  verse — they 
have  learnt  from  Shakespeare,  or  found  out  for  them- 
selves, almost  the  full  virtue  of  the  varied  pause  and  run- 
on  sense,  though  they  are  less  careful  than  he  is  to  vary 
the  variation.  This  varied  pause  and  run-on  sense,  in 
fact,  is  almost  necessary  in  order  to  carry  off  frequent 
redundance  :  for  a  succession  of  single-moulded  lines  with 
redundant  endings  is  one  of  the  most  monotonous  and 
one  of  the  ugliest  things  possible  in  blank-verse  making.1 
In  fact,  the  exquisiteness  of  their  lyrics  shows  the  very 
high  prosodic  degree  which  they,  or  one  of  them,  probably 
Fletcher,  had  attained.  In  hands  less  drilled  to  harmony, 
the  redundance  could  not  but  have  been  offensive  ;  and 
in  such  hands  it  was  bound  to  become  so.  But  this 
sleight  of  ear,  and  wise  abstinence  from  "  licence  on 
licence,"  kept  them,  if  not  scatheless,  yet  comparatively 
unscathed.  It  made  them,  however,  none  the  better 
models,  for  the  old  vitiis  imitabile  is  nowhere  a  truer 
maxim  than  in  prosody. 

Massinger.  The  blank  verse  of  Massinger,  inferior  as  he  is  in 
poetry  to  the  twins,  has  in  a  certain  sense  more  interest 
than  theirs,  because  it  exhibits  conflicting  tendencies. 

1  Take  an  instance  even  from  their  own  work  in  the  speech  of  Archas 
(The  Loyal  Subject,  IV.  v.).  Here  are  very  numerous  redundances  (only  four 
or  five  lines  out  of  twenty-nine  being  without  them),  few  or  no  important 
internal  pauses,  and  a  general  single-moulded  line — 

If  I  had  swelled  the  soldier,  or  intended 

An  act  in  person  leaning  to  dishonour, 

As  you  would  fain  have  forced  me,  witness  Heaven, 

Where  clearest  understanding  of  all  truth  is 

(For  men  are  spiteful  men,,  and  know  no  pi[e]ty). 

When  Olin  came,  grim  Olin,  when  his  marches,  etc.,  etc.,  etc. 

It  is  not  easy  to  imagine  a  worse  effect,  and  I  am  bound  to  say  that  the 
peculiar  "  Fletcherian "  amphibrach  or  antibacchic  conclusion  (of  which 
Milton's  "in  this  soil,"  and  similar  things  (v.  sup.),  are  supposed  to  be 
followings),  does  not  arride  me  much,  especially  when  preceded,  as  it  is 
often  or  very  closely,  by  a  pause.  It  has,  as  I  said  above,  a  "stumbling" 
— as  I  might  almost  say  a  hiccupping — effect,  which  I  cannot  think  agreeable 
or  artistic. 


CHAP,  in     DEC  A  Y  OF  DRAMATIC  BLANK  VERSE  305 

We  know  that  he  worked  with  Fletcher  ;  and  if  we  did 
not  know  it,  the  approximation  of  some  of  his  verse  to 
that  of  the  more  usual  pair  would  be  obvious  to  any 
careful  reader.  Indeed,  I  believe  the  "  enumerators " 
rank  him  next  to  Fletcher,  though  a  good  deal  below  him, 
in  point  of  "  weak  endings,"  which  are  evident  enough 
in  most  of  his  best  and  worst  passages.  Nay  more,  he 
sometimes  experiences  the  drawbacks  of  the  practice 
more  than  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  do  ;  for  he  is  less  careful 
to  vary  and  lengthen  the  internal  pauses,  and  not  unfre- 
quently  has  a  full  stop  at  the  redundant  syllable,  a  thing 
only  tolerable  in  very  special  cases.  On  the  other  hand, 
his  proportion  of  redundant  lines  is  certainly  smaller  ;  and 
he  seems  to  have  realised  the  truth  that  they  are  season- 
ings, or  at  most  side-dishes,  not  pieces  de  resistance.  The 
consequence  is  that  two  closely  connected  but  not  quite 
indistinguishable  types  of  blank  verse  emerge  in  him — 
the  one  nearer  to  Fletcher  and  "  dissolution,"  the  other  to 
Shakespeare  and  the  perfect  middle  way.  Indeed,  here 
for  the  first  time  we  can  speak  of  resemblance  to  the 
greater  and  earlier  writers  with  some  special  propriety. 
More  than  one  student  of  the  Elizabethan  drama,  since  it 
was  possible  to  study  it  as  a  whole  or  nearly  so,  has 
noticed  in  Massinger,  and  in  him  first,  distinct  "  literary  " 
quality — the  evidence  of  writing  in  a  school.1  And  this 
is,  I  think,  as  clear  in  the  passages  where  he  tempers 
redundance  with  arrest,  and  thus  is  at  his  highest;  as  in 
those  where  he  lets  the  Fletcherian  volubility  carry 
him  away. 

Ford  is  so  much  less  inclined  to  redundance  that,  Ford, 
reading  him  independently  and  in  no  conscious  relation 
to  others,  it  might  seem,  in  him,  no  more  than  the  excep- 
tion which  occurs,  as  we  have  seen,  almost  from  the  first. 
Indeed,  his  blank  verse  generally  is  of  a  much  older  type 
than  that  of  any  one  mentioned  in  this  chapter ;  and  it 
sometimes,  as  in  the  remarkable  piece  of  lurid  bombast 

1  I  do  not  refer  to  mere  citations  and  references,  such  as  those  dealt  with 
in  Dr.  E.  Koeppel's  interesting  essays  on  Ben  Jonsons  Wirkung,  etc. 
(Heidelberg,  1906). 

VOL.  II  X 


306     LATER  JACOBEAN  6-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

(and  yet  not  quite  bombast  neither)  which  may  be  cited 
below  from  Love}s  Sacrifice^  carries  one  right  back  to  the 
University  Wits.  Nor  in  his  greater  plays  does  the  staple 
of  verse  ever  approach  the  dressing-gown-and-slippers  form. 
It  is  impossible,  in  our  very  limited  knowledge  of  Ford's 
history,  to  decide  whether  this  is  a  case  of  a  man  writing 
late  in  life  (as  he  seems  pretty  certainly  to  have  done) 
and  deliberately  or  unconsciously  observing  the  fashions 
of  his  youth,  or  of  one  making  (in  this  case  deliberately 
beyond  all  doubt)  a  literary  study  of  his  forerunners  and 
adopting  a  standard  according  to  the  older  of  them. 
Probably  there  is  something  of  both  ;  there  is  almost 
certainly  something,  whether  much  or  little,  of  the  second. 
For  Ford,  though  very  far  indeed  from  being  the  least,  is 
certainly  the  most  artificial  of  all  the  giant  race  before  the 
flood  ;  he  smells  most  of  the  lamp ;  he  betrays  most 
clearly  that  rencherissement  which  we  can  only  express  in 
English  by  the  doubly  disreputable  aid  of  paraphrase  and 
slang.  It  is  almost  if  not  quite  a  necessary  consequence 
of  this,  that  his  blank  verse  is  the  least  flowing  and  varied 
of  any.  But  it  ought  to  be  set  to  his  credit  that  it  is  an 
almost  perfect  instrument  for  the  class  of  subjects  which 
he  proposes  to  treat.  The  consummate  and  universal 
Shakespearian  form  would  expose  the  "  extra-naturality  " 
of  the  Broken  Heart  and  'Tis  pity  she's  a  Whore  too  much  ; 
the  loose  Fletcherian  would  make  their  excesses  disgusting. 
In  neither  Massinger  nor  Ford,  however,  can  there  be 
said  to  be  much  abuse  of  the  trisyllabic  foot ;  while  the 
very  peculiarities  which  have  been  mentioned  save  Ford, 
and  to  a  rather  less  degree  Massinger,  from  the  great 
danger  of  all,  slipshod  and  clumsy  enjambment  This 
cannot  be  said  of  the  last  scene  or  "  Shakescene  "  of  the 
Shirley,  company,  James  Shirley.  The  literary  tendency  which 

1  iv.  I.      Diike.   Forbear  ;  the  ashy  paleness  of  my  cheek 
Is  scarleted  in  ruddy  flakes  of  wrath  ; 
And,  like  some  bearded  meteor,  shall  suck  up 
With  swiftest  terror  all  those  dusky  mists 
That  overcloud  compassion  in  our  breast. 

Here,  as  of  old,  it  does  not  matter  in  the  very  least  that  there  is  no  stop 
either  at  "  cheek  "  or  "  mists."     The  line  as  such  is  bullet-moulded. 


CHAP,  in     DECA  Y  OF  DRAMA  TIC  BLANK  VERSE  307 

has  just  been  noticed  is  more  noticeable  in  Shirley  than 
ever :  he  not  only  collaborates  with  other  men — that  had 
always  been  done — but  he  finishes  their  work,  writes  new 
plays  which  are  obvious  refashionings  of  old,  follows 
parts  of  old  plays  freely.  He  is,  moreover,  of  his  own 
time  as  well  as  of  theirs,  and  though  not  by  any  means  so 
great  a  sinner  in  the  special  sins  of  that  time  as  some,  he 
is  not  free  from  them,  as  the  speech  of  Fernando  in 
Act  II.  Sc.  i.  of  The  Brothers ;  one  of  his  best  and  most 
serious  attempts,  will  show.1  Nobody,  I  suppose,  will 
charge  the  present  writer  with  looking  too  much  awry 
on  prosodic  licences.  But  I  do  not  see  how  it  is  possible 
to  regard  such  things  as  the  line-breaks  at  "  what,"  and 
still  more  the  thrice-continued  one  at  "  to,"  "  thou,"  and 
"  shall,"  as  other  than  extremely  ugly  blemishes.  It  is 
true  that  Shirley  rarely — as  we  shall  see  in  a  moment 
many  of  his  fellows  do — complicates  this  licence  with 
others — redundance,  trisyllabic  feet  of  the  clumsiest  kind, 
and  ill-rhythmed  lines  or  lines  of  quite  haphazard  length, 
till  verse  disappears  altogether  in  a  slough  of  the  most 
awkward  prose.  But  in  this  overrunning  of  the  line 
which  must  be  taken  in  conjunction  with  the  tendency 
to  overrun  the  couplet  (see  last  chapter),  he  is  a  most 
offending  soul.  One  turns  a  leaf  and  finds — 

He  had  better  cool  his  hot  blood  in  the  frozen 
Sea,  and  rise  hence  a  rock  of  adamant 
To  draw  more  wonder  to  the  north,  than  but 
Attempt  to  wrong  her  chastity. 

1  I  dare, 

With  conscience  of  my  pure  intent,  try  what 
Rudeness  you  find  upon  my  lip,  'tis  chaste 
As  the  desires  that  breathe  upon  my  language. 
I  began,  Felisarda,  to  affect  thee 
By  seeing  thee  at  prayers  ;  thy  virtue  winged 
Love's  arrows  first,  and  'twere  a  sacrilege 
To  choose  thee  now  for  sin,  that  hast  a  power 
To  make  this  place  a  temple  by  thy  innocence. 
I  know  thy  poverty,  and  came  not  to 
Bribe  it  against  thy  chastity  ;  if  thou 
Vouchsafe  thy  fair  and  honest  love,  it  shall 
Adorn  my  fortunes  which  shall  stoop  to  serve  it 
In  spite  of  friends  or  destiny. 

(Ed.  Dyce,  i.  212.) 


308     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  6-  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

Here  a  fight  might  be  made  for  "  but "  if  it  stood  by 
itself ;  but  the  neighbourhood  of  "  frozen "  with  its 
totally  unjustifiable  divorce  from  "  sea "  is  not  likely  to 
dispose  any  one  with  an  ear  to  mercy.  And  what  on  earth 
was  there  to  prevent  his  writing — 

He  had  better  cool  his  hot  blood  in  the  sea 
Of  ice,  and  rise  a  rock  of  adamant  ? 

That  is,  in  fact,  the  question  ;  and  it  is  a  question  which 
can  only  be  answered,  "  The  spirit  of  the  age  was  there 
to  prevent  him,  and  he  was  not  strong  enough  to  with- 
stand it."  Not  that  Shirley  is  a  bad  blank-verse  writer 
by  any  means  ;  these  very  passages,  which  were  chosen  at 
the  purest  hazard  to  show  his  vices,  show  his  virtues  as 
well.1  He  really  has  at  times,  and  not  so  seldom,  form, 
fire,  timbre.  I  am  not  certain  that  he  has  not  some- 
times more  of  these  than  either  Ford  or  Massinger,  though 
he  has  nothing  like  their  dramatic  power.  But  the 
epidemic  of  looseness  is  on  him,  though  not  in  its  worst 
form.  With  Minerva  willing  he  can  write  the  beautiful 
last  lines  of  Amidea,  which  are  so  interesting  to  contrast 
with  Otway's  similar  exaggerations  of  Fletcherian  senti- 
ment, and  the  still  more  beautiful  lament  of  Florio  over 
her,  where,  be  it  observed,  redundance  appears  strongly  to 
express  passion  in  the  old  way.  Nor  does  he  require 
strong  situations  ;  although  facile  in  these  he  can  furnish 
ordinary  blank  verse  as  well  as  Middleton  or  Heywood 
(as  per  dip  in  The  Young  Admiral,  p.  123),  and  some- 
times extraordinary  blank  verse  (as  in  The  Cardinal, 
p.  343).  His  prowess  in  lyric  is  well  known  ;  and  that 
he  should  sometimes  slip  in  the  manner  above  indicated 
is  a  great  sign  of  the  times. 

To  find,  however,  this  sign  in  complete  ascendant,  we 

1  The  very  beautiful  one  (noticed  long  ago  by  Farmer,  and  in  a  note  to 
Dyce's  ed. ),  ending — 

And  with  it  many  beams  twisted  themselves 
Upon  whose  golden  threads  the  angels  walk 
To  and  again  from  Heaven, 

is  not  far  from  the  others. 


CHAP,  in     DECA  Y  OF  DRAMATIC  BLANK  VERSE  309 

must  pursue  the  line  of  evidence  (as  it  was  not  necessary 
to  do  in  the  last  chapter  on  the  subject)  through  some  of 
the  minorities.  Not  all  are  guilty,  yet  even  in  the 
innocent  we  may  observe  that  they  are,  as  a  rule,  the 
older.  Thomas  Randolph,1  as  became  a  son  of  Ben  and  Randolph. 
a  scholar,  is  quite  free  from  the  roughest  impeachment. 
Randolph's  verse  may  not  be  of  the  first  quality  as  poetry  ; 
his  subjects  do  not  give  it  much  opportunity  of  being  so. 
But  it  is  strong,  free,  well-ordered,  and  able  to  avail  itself 
of  all  lawful  things  without  being  brought  into  bondage  to 
any.  The  speech  of  Mediocrity  at  the  close  of  The 
Muses'  Looking-Glass  is  an  excellent  piece  of  blank  verse 
of  a  good  pattern  ;  and  neither  here  nor  in  the  other  plays 
shall  we  find  anything  that  can  truly  be  called  bad.  The 
frequentation  of  Ben  indeed  appears  to  have  been  to  some 
extent  sovereign  against  verse-paralysis.  "  Dick  "  Brome,  Brome. 
whom  he  "  had  for  a  servant  once  "  and  whose  promotion 
to  the  status  of  playwright  he  welcomed  in  nearly  his  best 
manner,  was  a  person  whose  own  manner  obviously 
"  better  suited  prose."  The  character  of  his  happiest 
plays — and  they  are  very  far  from  unhappy — invites  it,  and 
he  does  well  in  it.  But  when  he  has  occasion  to  give 
verse,  which  he  does  not  infrequently,  it  is  quite  competent 
and  in  fact  rather  interesting,  because  it  takes  all  the 
liberties — redundance,  trisyllabic  feet,  etc.  It  is  never, 
perhaps,  very  poetical,  but  also  it  never  falls  into  mere 
chaos.  The  general  blank-verse  scheme  is  perfectly  well 
maintained. 

Another  minor  of  the  third  decade  of  the  century,  Davenport. 
Robert  Davenport,  is  also,  at  his  best,  fairly  "  tight 
and  shipshape  and  Bristol  fashion."  Now  this  is  the  more 
remarkable  because  his  plays  are  not  well  printed  ;  and 
Mr.  Bullen  in  his  reprint  of  them  has  taken  no  liberties, 
though  he  makes  a  few  suggestions.  There  is  plenty  of 
very  rough  verse  in  him.  I  do  not  know  that  it  can 

1  Of  course  his  claims  are  not  limited  to  blanks.  He  has  good  couplets  ; 
capital  "broken  and  cuttit  verse"  in  the  "Anthony  Stafford"  Ode  and  other 
pieces;  excellent  octosyllabic  triplets  in  his  "  Epithalamium."  But  it  is  all 
rather  forged  than  fused. 


310     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

be  acquitted  entirely  of  symptoms  of  a  break-up.  The 
trisyllabic  feet  are  often  mere  slurs,  mere  patter ;  and 
there  are  numerous  passages  where  one  would  very  greatly 
prefer  mere  prose,  and  may  indeed  suspect  that  mere 
prose  was  meant.  But  these  very  shortcomings  imply 
that  he  has  over  all  an  impression  and  atmosphere  of  the 
true  blank  verse — which  impression  and  atmosphere  are 
the  very  things  that  are  wanting  in  some  writers  to  whom 
we  are  coming. 

Nabbes.  The  same  is  very  much  the  case  with  the  still  later, 

looser,  and  more  pedestrian  Nabbes.  There  is  really  not 
much  more  need  for  him  to  "  drop  into  verse  "  than  there 
is  for  Brome,  but  he  does  it,  and  does  it  by  no  means 
badly.  He  even  sometimes,  as  in  The  Unfortunate  Mother, 
resolves  to  be  nothing  if  not  poetical,  and  carries  out  his 
resolve  without  too  much  failure  from  the  merely  formal 
point  of  view.  Only,  once  more,  when  he  employs  the  two, 
one  can  often  hardly  help  saying,  "  Why  not  write  prose 
entirely  ?  "  and  when  he  sticks  to  verse,  "  Was  it  necessary 
to  take  so  much  trouble  ?  "  For,  once  more,  blank  verse 
is,  in  the  double  sense,  nearest  prose  ;  and  it  has  to  be  in 
many  ways  careful  lest  it  knock  down  the  partition 
between  the  two  houses. 

Giapthorne.  That  much-abused,  and  it  may  be  admitted  not  very 
much-deserving,  playwright  Giapthorne  occupies  perhaps  a 
somewhat  middle  position.  As  there  is  no  reason  why 
some  of  his  plays  should  have  been  more  carefully  printed 
than  others,  one  can  only  suppose  that  he  himself  was 
more  careless  in  some  of  them.  Take  Sir  Martin's  speech 
in  the  first  Scene  of  the  fourth  Act  of  The  Hollander,  and 
you  will  have  to  rewrite  it  in  its  earlier  or  latter  parts  to  get 
any  kind  of  pure  blank-verse  rhythm  into  them  ;  yet  the 
middle  is  of  very  fair  quality.  Contrast  Wallenstein's  speech 
and  that  of  his  son  on  opposite  pages  of  the  Pearson 
reprint  (48,  49) ;  take  numerous  speeches  of  Doria  in 
The  Lady's  Privilege.  They  might  seem  to  have  been 
written  by  different  persons  :  it  is  difficult  to  imagine  that 
any  one  who  had  been  sufficiently  broken  to  the  writing 
of  blank  verse  to  produce  some  of  them,  or  parts  of  some, 


CHAP,  in     DECA  Y  OF  DRAMA  TIC  BLANK  VERSE  31  r 

could  possibly  be  guilty  of  others  or  parts  of  others.  Yet  an 
example  of  this  kind  is  a  convenient  and  valuable  bridge 
between  those  which  we  have  just  been  examining  and 
those  which  we  are  now  to  examine.  That  the  school  of 
Fletcher  generally  tended  to  laxity,  and  the  school  of 
Jonson  to  correctness,  may  be  true  enough.  But  there 
must  have  been  something  in  the  air  which  affected  the 
former  to  produce  something  more  than  laxity.  For 
Fletcher  is  seldom  or  never  unrhythmical  :  men  like 
Glapthorne,  and,  still  more,  men  like  the  remarkable  pair 
to  which  we  are  coming,  with  even  Shirley  to  keep  them 
company,  are. 

Of  Suckling  we  may  certainly  say,  as  we  said  of  The  actual 
Shirley,  that  his  metrical  prowess  in  lyric  is  well  known  ; 
indeed,  it  is  much  better  known.  Some  half-a-dozen  pieces 
of  Suckling's  are  familiar,  to  the  fairly  well-read  general 
reader,  for  one  of  Shirley's.  It  is  true  there  is  the  doggerel 
Session  ;  but  putting  what  is  said  elsewhere  aside,  the  most 
accurate  and  punctilious  metrist  in  the  world  may  write 
doggerel  deliberately.  Take  up  Suckling's  plays  and  you 
will  meet  on  every  page  doggerel  that  is  not  meant — that 
has  no  conceivable  reason  for  being  meant — as  doggerel. 
There  is  a  specimen  on  the  third  page  of  Aglaura — not 
an  extreme  one  by  any  means,  but  a  fair  average. 

This  opens,  not  with  a  casual  Alexandrine  which 
Shakespeare  might  very  well  do,  but  with  rhymed 
Alexandrines — things  uncommonly  difficult  to  smuggle 
in,  even  with  a  special  purpose,  in  blank  verse.  Then  it 
at  once  settles  down  to  rather  shambling  decasyllabics  of 
the  ordinary  kind.  All  of  a  sudden  occurs  a  clumsy  octo- 
syllable— 

Would  come  should  make  me  master  of, 

paralleled  lower  down  by  another  and  clumsier— 
It  cannot  be  long,  for  sure  fate  must. 

The  example,  it  has  been  said,  is  not  an  extreme  one,  but 
it  already  makes  one  think  of  the  Lydgatian  chaos  which 
we  struggled  through  of  old.  Here  is  a  worse — 


312     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

Thor.  Softly,  as  death  itself  comes  on 

When  it  doth  steal  away  the  sick  man's  breath, 

And  standers-by  perceive  it  not, 

Have  I  trod  the  way  unto  their  lodgings. 

How  wisely  do  those  powers 

That  give  us  happiness  order  it !  etc.  etc. 

Now  I  do  not  say  that  by  "  arranging  "  you  may  not 
pull  a  verse  here  and  a  verse  there  straight  after  a  fashion, 
but  I  do  say  that  the  whole  is  hopeless.  And  one  could 
parallel  it  and  outdo  it,  a  hundred  times  over,  from 
Suckling. 

Davenant.  But  there  is  another  case  which  is  almost  as  strange 
as  Suckling's.  Davenant,  if  not  one  of  the  greatest,  was 
one  of  the  most  thorough  men  of  letters  of  his  time.  He 
belonged  to  the  older  race,  not  merely  by  his  perhaps 
mythical  relation  to  Shakespeare,  but  by  his  certain 
association  with  Fulke  Greville  and  others ;  to  the  middle 
by  his  friendship  with  Hobbes  and  all  the  wits  of  the  First 
Caroline  period  and  the  interregnum,  as  well  as  by  nearly 
forty  years'  practice  in  letters  and  the  theatre  ;  to  the 
newer  age  by  his  friendship  and  partnership  with  Dryden, 
and  the  powerful  assistance  which  he  gave  to  the  return 
to  rhyme  on  the  stage.  He  was  not  only  more  of  a  poet 
than  is  sometimes  thought,  but  a  good  deal  of  a  critic  ;  he 
could  write  correct  and  stately  verse  enough  in  Gondibert ; 
and  one  or  two  of  his  lyrics — the  early  lines  on  Shake- 
speare, the  famous  "  Lark  "  song,  and  others — could  no 
more  have  been  written  by  a  man  without  an  ear  than 
Suckling's  could,  though  they  may  not  have  quite  the 
same  airy  grace.  Yet  Sir  John  himself  is  not  a  greater 
sinner  than  Sir  William  in  respect  of  chaotic  and  barbarous 
blank  verse.  The  third  line  of  his  first  play,  Albovine, 
which  dates  as  early  as  1629,  runs — 

Verona  which,  with  the  morning's  dim  eye — 

an  almost  Occlevian  abomination  in  its  shapeless 
decasyllabicity,  without  corresponding  rhythm.  Suppose, 
charitably,  that  there  is  something  wrong  here — there 
certainly  is,  but  not  in  this  sense — and  turn  the  page  to 


CHAP,  in     DECAY  OF  DRAMATIC  BLANK  VERSE  313 

get  a  whole  speech  of  some  length  in  verse,  that  of 
Hermenegild  to  Paradine — 

Rhodolinda  doth  become  her  title 

And  her  birth.     Since  deprived  of  popular 

Homage,  she  hath  been  queen  over  her  great  self. 

In  this  captivity  ne'er  passionate 

But  when  she  hears  me  name  the  king,  and  then 

Her  passions  not  of  anger  taste  but  love  : 

Love  of  her  conqueror  ;  he  that  in  fierce 

Battle  (when  the  cannon's  sulphurous  breath 

Clouded  the  day)  her  noble  father  slew. 

Now  I  venture  to  say  that  this  is  immedicable.  To 
the  sanguine  and  complaisant  ear  some  scraps  of 
rhythmical  promise,  "  Her  title  and  her  birth,"  "  She  hath 
been  queen,"  and  similar  rearrangements,  may  suggest 
themselves.  But  it  will  be  found  that  nothing  of  the 
kind  "  will  do " :  it  only  leaves  nubbles  of  shapeless  and 
concordless  phrase  wedged  between  the  experiments. 
Of  course,  if  you  slash  with  a  Bentleian  hook,  and  simply 
throw  the  slashings  away,  you  can  do  something  with  it  ; 
but  that  is  not  the  way  we  behave  round  this  mulberry 
bush.  Even  the  last  resource  of  throwing  the  whole  into 
prose — a  thing  which  doubtless  at  this  time  may  be  done 
in  some  cases  with  advantage  and  perhaps  justice — will 
leave  it  in  no  better  condition.  For  then  it  will  be  the 
scraps  of  rhythm  that  intrude  themselves  awkwardly ; 
and  moreover,  the  order  of  the  words  is  not  prose  order. 
It  simply  has  to  be  taken  for  what  it  is — blank  verse, 
but  hopelessly  bad  blank  verse — knock-kneed,  mutilated, 
awkwardly  sliced  at  line-ends,  with  no  pause-composition  ; 
as  inartistic  as  anything  can  possibly  be. 

Battle  (when  the  cannon's  sulphurous  breath 

is  about  as  vile  a  thing  metrically  as  I  remember  ;  and 
if  anybody  says  that  you  can  put  it  all  right  by  reading 
"  battalia "  or  some  similar  form,  I  can  only  once  more 
reply  that,  no  doubt,  if  things  were  different  they  would 
not  be  the  same,  and  that  if  Venus  Anadyomene  is 
allowed  to  be  substituted  for  Venus  Hottentotiana  there 
will  doubtless  be  an  improvement  in  colour,  outline,  and 


3H     LATER  JACOBEAN  S-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

the  rest.  Moreover,  it  is  the  same  everywhere,  both  in 
this  play  and  in  others.  You  may  think,  now  and  then, 
that  you  have  got  out  of  the  stones  of  stumbling  and  on 
to  fairly  level  ground  ;  but  you  will  assuredly  find  yourself 
sprawling  headlong,  before  a  score  or  so  of  lines  have 
been  read.  Even  when  some  sort  of  rhythm  is  kept  it 
is  only  by  aid  of  reckless  splitting  of  adjective  from 
subjective,  preposition  from  case,  noun  from  verb,  without 
the  faintest  excuse  or  atonement  of  special  poetic  or 
rhetorical  effect.  It  is  bad  blank  verse — and  there's  an 
end  of  it. 

The  problem.  Now  what  does  this  mean  ?  How  could  a  man  who 
could  write  the  "  Ballad  on  a  Wedding,"  or  "  Tis  now 
since  I  sat  down  before,"  sit  down,  either  before  or  after, 
to  write  such  stuff  as  this,  believing  it  to  be  any  kind  of 
tolerable  verse  whatever  ?  How  could  an  equally  or  more 
hopeless  thing  be  done  by  one  who  could  accomplish  the 
workmanlike,  if  not  wonderful,  quatrains  of  Gondibert, 
the  decent  couplets  of  the  Siege  of  Rhodes,  and  divers 
lyric  measures,  without  tripping?  How,  much  more,  could 
a  man  like  Shirley,  who  was  neither  a  mere  dilettante 
like  Suckling,  nor  of  a  generation  that  was  actually  and 
already  breaking  away  from  blank  verse  like  Davenant, 
occasionally  condescend  to  it  ?  Why  did  Glapthorne, 
small  as  may  be  his  actual  inspiration,  fail  to  produce  at 
least  as  respectable  verse  as  men  a  little  earlier,  with  no 
greater  gifts  than  his,  could  turn  out  ?  And  why  in  other 
writers  do  we  see  the  same  sort  of  "  rot "  spreading  ?  The 
answer  is,  I  think,  twofold. 

In  the  first  place,  the  degradation,  strange  as  it  may 

answer.  seem,  can  be  set  down  in  part  to  that  very  imitation,  that 
very  "  literary  spirit,"  which  has  been  noticed.  It  must 
be  remembered  that  the  growth  and  the  failing  of  blank 
verse  were  not  separated  from  each  other  by  any  con- 
siderable stationary  period  of  orthodox  and  settled 
practice.  They  overlapped  each  other  with  a  copious 
and  complicated  overlapping,  and  the  pupils  could,  with 
the  greatest  ease,  take  the  irregularities  which  their 
masters  had  permitted  themselves  on  the  way  to  per- 


CHAP,  in     DEC  A  Y  OF  DRAMA  TIC  BLANK  VERSE  315 

faction  as  steps  on  the  way  to  perdition.  Further, 
though  I  believe  too  much  rather  than  too  little  stress 
has  been  laid  on  the  long-suffering  shoulders  of  the 
printer,  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  printed  editions 
of  Shakespeare  and  the  rest  are  not  exactly  things  "to 
lippen  to,"  to  place  implicit  and  unquestioning  faith  in. 
But,  most  of  all,  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  most 
perfect  blank  verse  is  (from  certain  points  of  view)  a  tissue 
of  exceptions  and  irregularities,  and  that  it  requires  but 
a  very  little  blundering  in  the  use  of  these  to  make  it  a 
complete  failure. 

And  this  brings  us  to  the  other  fold  of  the  answer — 
that  there  was  a  spirit  of  such  blundering  abroad,  and 
that  by  its  works  we  know  it 

The  overlapping  mentioned  above  confuses  the  vision  ; 
while  perhaps  if  we  endeavour  to  get  the  two  sets  of 
phenomena  separately  envisaged,  there  is  a  danger  of 
regarding  them  too  separately.  But,  on  the  whole,  when 
we  consider  the  total  effect  of  the  work  reviewed  in  the 
last  chapter  on  this  special  subject,  and  the  total  effect  of 
that  reviewed  in  this,  two  different  spectacles  do  seem 
to  outline  themselves  to  the  mind's  eye.  The  one  is  of 
a  house,  or  houses,  in  process  of  building — in  various 
stages  of  the  process,  in  fact.  Here  the  walls  are  half- 
reared  ;  there  the  complete  "  carcass "  is  finished,  and 
even  perhaps  roofed  in,  but  the  interior  is  in  various 
stages  of  imperfection.  Here  you  have  only  the  joists  of 
a  floor  ;  there  the  frame  of  a  staircase  clinging  to  the 
walls  ;  or  all  this  done,  but  no  decoration,  no  paper  or 
painting.  On  the  other  side  we  have  a  house  or  houses 
in  the  process  of  pulling  down,  and  at  some  stages  of 
that  process  not  very  distantly  resembling  stages  in  the 
other  process  of  building  up.  But  to  the  fairly  acute 
and  careful  observer  the  two  things  are  very  different. 
The  "  fervency  of  the  work  "  is  constructive  in  the  one  case, 
destructive  in  the  other.  In  the  one  the  workman  is 
making  himself  a  pou  sto  for  further  advance  ;  in  the 
other  he  is  hacking  away  the  brick-work  under  him, 
making  the  plaster  fly,  tumbling  down  the  beams  and 


3 16     LA  TER  JA  CO  BE  AN  &•  CAROLINE  POETR  Y    BOOK  vi 

planking.       There   is   not   much    doubt   as   to   what   the 
result  will  be  in  the  respective  conditions. 

Further  As  a  contrast  of  the  two  styles  I  do  not  think  it  too 

Goff  and~~  freakish  to  take  two  writers,  each  of  whom  has  been 
Cokain.  rather  a  by-word  with  literary  historians  than  a  familiar 
study  with  readers — one  of  whom,  indeed,  is  still  not  easy 
to  study.  I  refer  to  Thomas  Goff,  of  The  Raging  Turk, 
and  Sir  Aston  Cokain,  of  The  Obstinate  Lady.  Goff  was 
indeed  an  older  man  than  Cokain  by  some  sixteen  or 
seventeen  years ;  but  the  former's  plays  were  being 
acted  at  Oxford  (c.  1630)  just  at  the  time  when  the 
latter  was  at  Cambridge  ;  and  we  know  from  Cokain's 
too  chary  revelations  about  the  older  playwrights  that  he 
must  have  been  theatre-bitten  pretty  early.  Moreover, 
the  date  of  the  second  (collected)  edition  of  Goff1 
coincides  very  nearly  with  the  appearance 2  of  Cokain's 
work — the  date  of  composition  of  which  we  do  not  know 
at  all.  There  is  very  good  ground  for  thinking  that  it 
preceded  the  shutting  of  the  theatres.  Anyhow,  and 
giving  full  value  to  their  difference  of  birth-date,  they 
represent,  all  the  more  completely  for  that,  the  older  and 
the  younger  generation  of  First  Caroline  playwrights. 
Now  Goff,  whose  work  is  even  in  other  respects  rather 
better  than  it  has  sometimes  been  represented  as  being,  is  a 
most  respectable  if  by  no  means  a  heaven-born  blank-verse 
writer.  He  drops  into  couplet  sometimes — one  would 
expect  him  to  do  so — at  the  end  of  scenes  and  speeches, 
and  sometimes  elsewhere.  Yet  his  blank  verse,  as  blank 
verse,  is  orderly  enough  ;  you  will  not  find  a  real  "  hobbler," 
certainly  not  due  to  the  printer,  at  all  frequently. 

But  with  Sir  Aston  it  is  quite  different.  His  plays 
vary  a  little  in  this  respect.  I  think  Ovid  is  rather  more 
regular  than  The  Obstinate  Lady  and  Trappolin.  But 
even  in  it,  and  much  more  in  the  others,  the  "  rot " 8 
appears.  Most  people  know  that  uncomfortable  affection 

1  1656.      This,   of  which  is  my  copy,  is  not  a  common   book,  and  the 
earlier  separate  editions  (1631-33)  of  Goff  are  very  rare  indeed. 

2  1658. 

3  This,  let  it  be  remembered,  was  a  contemporary  word  applied  almost 
exactly  in  the  modern  cricket  sense. 


CHAP,  in     DEC  A  Y  OF  DRAMATIC  BLANK  VERSE  317 

of  the  muscles  or  sinews,  or  whatever  it  is,  which  makes 
a  man  Mr.  Ready- to- Halt  without  notice,  and  without  his 
in  the  least  expecting  it.  This  happens  to  Cokain 
constantly ;  he  is  never  safe  from  it ;  and  not  seldom 
he  simply  "  hirples." 

Another  comparison  is  fortuitously  suggested  by  the 
presence  of  the  plays  in  the  same  volume  of  Mr.  Bullen's 
invaluable  collection,  but  is  in  itself  much  more  than 
fortuitous.  The  fine  anonymous  play  of  Nero l  was  Nero  and 
published  in  1624,  or  just  at  about  the  turning-point 
of  blank  verse.  Henry  Shirley's  Martyred  Soldier  dates 
fourteen  years  later,  in  1638,  when  blank  verse  was  far 
down  the  hill.  That  the  first  piece  was  evidently  by 
some  one  of  greater  talent  than  Shirley  the  lesser — 
perhaps  even  than  Shirley  the  greater — does  not  affect 
the  question.  For  certainly  Suckling,  for  instance,  had 
talent  enough  for  a  dozen  Chettles  or  Haughtons  ;  and 
yet  Chettle  and  Haughton  write  very  decent  "  blanks." 
But  the  Nero  man,  whoever  he  was,  and  whether  he  writes 
just  at  the  time  when  his  play  appeared  or  earlier,  writes 
with  his  verse-team  perfectly  in  hand.  Some  of  them 
may  trot  and  some  may  canter — he  evidently  wrote  late 
enough  to  allow  himself  a  good  deal  of  redundance, 
though  not  of  the  Fletcherian  kind, — but  the  whole  sweep 
well  together  in  almost  every  instance — a  few  misprints 
and  the  like  excepted.  The  example  to  be  given  below 
is  a  fair  average  one.2  Just  compare  it  with  Belisarius' 

1  This  play  was  made  accessible  to  a  larger    public   than  Mr.   Bullen's 
subscribers    in    an    omnibus    volume    of    the    useful    "  Mermaid "    Series 
(London,  1888). 

2  To  make  it  "average"  I  avoid  the  specially  fine  speech  of  Petronius 
known  from  Lamb. 

Nero.   Aye,  now  my  Troy  looks  beauteous  in  her  flames  ; 

The  Tyrrhene  seas  are  bright  with  Roman  fires, 

Whilst  the  amazed  mariner  afar, 

Gazing  on  the  unknown  light,  wonders  what  star 

Heaven  hath  begot  to  ease  the  aged  moon. 
(The  rhyme  is  quite  characteristic  and  possibly  intentional.) 
Belis.   Methought  one  evening,  sitting  on  a  fragrant  verge, 

Closely  there  ran  a  silver  gliding  stream  : 

I  passed  the  rivulet  and  came  to  a  garden — 

A  paradise,  I  should  say,  for  less  it  could  not  be, 

Such  sweetness  the  world  contained  not  as  I  saw. 


3i8     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

speech  from  the  Martyred  Soldier  which  has  been  put 
side  by  side.  It  is  not  the  contrast  of  bad  verse  with 
good  merely,  or  of  a  moderate  verser  with  a  better.  We 
are  in  a  different  country — or,  to  go  to  the  former 
metaphor,  the  horses  break  step,  pull  different  ways, 
stumble,  start  back,  do  everything  that  they  should  not 
do.  You  cannot  "  touch  up "  such  verse ;  it  must  be 
wholly  taken  to  pieces  and  re-made. 

A  few  examples  from  separate  plays  in  Hazlitt's 
"Dodsley  "  may  also  be  given — it  would  be  easy  to  multiply 
them  by  the  hundred.  Listen  to  the  excellent  Thomas 
Rebellion.  Rawlins  in  his  Rebellion,  two  years  later  than  The 
Martyred  Soldier,  and  two  years  before  the  closing  of 
the  theatres.1  One  thinks  curiously  of  that  fine  speech 
of  Greene's  heroine  fifty  years  before — 

Why  thinks  King  Henry's  son  that  Margaret's  love 
Hangs  in  the  uncertain  balance  of  proud  Time  ? 

and  then  perhaps,  one  may  think  likewise  of  Baudelaire's 
sonnets  on  Le  Lever  and  Le  Coucher  du  Soleil  Romantique 
and  transfer  them  to  the  sunrise  and  sunset  of  blank 
verse.  If  poor  Philippa's  poet — she  is,  as  one  of  the 
characters  says,  "  a  fiery  girl,"  and  her  speech  is  noways 
wholly  contemptible — had  just  avoided  those  two  hideous 
break-downs — 

Bring  all  the  rough  tortures 
and 

Practised  Sicilian  tyranny,  my  giant  thoughts, 

the  "  uncertain  balance  of  proud  Time  "  would  not  have 
put  her  so  far  below  Margaret.  But  his  ears  were 
stopped  and  his  hand  was  careless. 

1  Canst  thou,  proud  man,  think  that  Philippa's  heart 
Is  humbled  with  her  fortunes  ?     No,  didst  thou 
Bring  all  the  rough  tortures 

From  the  world's  childhood  to  this  hour  invented, 
And  on  my  resolute  body,  proof  against  pain, 
Practised  Sicilian  tyranny,  my  giant  thoughts 
Should  like  a  cloud  of  wind-containing  smoke 
Mingle  with  heaven  ; 
And  not  a  look  so  base  as  to  be  pitied 
Shall  give  you  cause  of  triumph. 


CHAP,  in     DECA  Y  OF  DRAMA  TIC  BLANK  VERSE  319 

Take  yet  another1  from  that  curious  play  Andromana,  Andromana. 
which,  though  not  printed  till  1  660,  is  probably  "  before 
the  flood  "  —  if  not  much  before.  The  speech  of  Plangus 
is  a  very  "  moral  "  of  the  hopeless  stuff  of  which  we  are 
now  speaking  —  of  verse  run  prose,  and  prose  run  mad, 
or  rather  of  something  that  is  neither  pedestrian  verse 
nor  bombasted  prose,  but  a  sort  of  gallimaufry  of  both, 
corresponding  with  an  almost  alarming  exactitude  to  the 
rhyme-royal  of  two  hundred  years  earlier,  and  making 
one  inquire  in  an  uneasy  fashion  whether  similar  things 
may  not  happen  x  hundred  years  later. 

Readers  who  really  take  an    interest    in    the  subject  Divers  Caroline 
might   indeed   do  worse  than   take  up,  say,  the  twelfth, 


thirteenth,  and  fourteenth  volumes  of  Hazlitt's  "  Dodsley  "  Lusts 

.  xl  -1.1  Dominion. 

and  run  over  the  pages,  stopping  whenever  they  see 
blank-verse  passages  in  plays  of  the  First  Caroline  time  — 
Habington's  Queen  of  Arragon,  Mayne's  City  Match,  May's 
Old  Couple,  Cartwright's  Ordinary,  Rutter's  Shepherd's 
Holiday,  Fisher's  quaint  True  Trojans,  Berkeley's  Lost 
Lady.  Almost  without  exception  they  will  discover  for 
themselves,  as  it  would  take  pages  on  pages  of  citation 
here  to  discover  to  them,  the  unscrewing  of  blank  verse 
in  all  its  stages,  and  the  fact  that  even  men  who  can  be 
perfectly  well  trusted  with  verse  of  other  kinds,  such  as 
Habington  and  Cartwright,  appear  to  have  lost  all  real 
grip  of  this  kind  —  though  they  may  not  be  quite  so 
extravagantly  chaotic  as  some  others.  The  degeneration 
takes  various  forms,  and  exhibits,  as  we  have  said,  various 
stages.  Now  it  is  not  much  more  than  a  slight  exaggera- 
tion of  Fletcherian  redundance  ;  now  this  is  extended  to 
the  ugly  splittings  of  connected  words  so  often  noticed  ; 
now  it  passes  into  chaos  proper  —  the  medley  of  non- 
descript inharmonies.  And  then  between  The  Rebellion 

1  'Tis  more  impossible  for  me  to  leave  thee 
Than  for  this  carcass  to  quoit  away  its  gravestone 
When  it  lies  destitute  of  a  soul  to  inform  it. 
Mariners  might  with  far  greater  ease 
Hear  whole  shoals  of  Sirens  singing 
And  not  leap  out  to  their  destruction 
Than  I  forsake  so  dangerous  a  sweetness. 


320     LATER  JACOBEAN  &-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

and  Andromana  themselves  let  such  a  reader  find  Lust's 
Dominion,  printed  at  about  the  same  time  as  the  latter 
and  twenty  years  after  the  former.  The  prosodic  effect 
is  like  nothing  on  earth  but  the  bucket  of  cold  water 
that  used  to  be  employed  in  early  and  Spartan  Turkish 
baths,  destitute  of  modern  frippery  and  luxury  of  equip- 
ment, at  the  University  of  Oxford  aeons  ago.  No  matter 
whether  this  "  Lascivious  Queen  "  is  Marlowe's  or  not — 
he  has  had  worse  things  ascribed  to  him  as  his  creatures, 
and  she  could  hardly  have  a  better  creator.  The  point 
is  the  absolutely  different  structure  of  the  verse — its 
vigour,  majesty,  "brace" — as  against  the  slipshod, "slamack- 
ing,"  dissolute  facility  of  the  others. 


CHAPTER    IV 

CAROLINE    LYRIC,    PINDARIC,    AND    STANZA 

Special  character  of  this  lyric — And  special  influence  of  Jonson  and 
Donne — Some  general  characteristics — Special  metres — The 
Caroline  C.M. — L.M.  and  In  Memoriam  quatrains — The  pure 
or  mixed  trochaic  measures — Herrick — Carevv — Crashaw — 
George  Herbert — Vaughan  —  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury — 
Marvell — The  general — Digression  on  "  Phillida  flouts  me" 
and  foot-division — "  Pindaric " — Its  rise  in  Cowley  and  its 
nature — The  inducements  to  it — Furor  poeticus,  etc.  —  Its 
intrinsic  attractions — Its  history — Cowley's  own  practice — 
The  decay  of  stanza — The  quatrain. 


THE  first  subject  of  the  present  chapter  forms  one  of  the  Special  char- 
acter 

lyric. 


most  delightful  bodies  of  matter  to  be  met  with  in  the  acter  of  this 


course  of  our  whole  inquiry  ;  and  it  appertains  to  that 
inquiry  in  a  peculiarly  important  fashion.  Yet  it  will  not 
perhaps  be  necessary  to  treat  it  at  a  length  greater  than, 
if  so  great  as,  that  which  we  have  given  to  periods  and 
products  very  much  less  interesting  and  less  obviously 
capital.  The  reason  of  this  is  that  its  contents  are,  in  a 
way,  results,  "  finals,"  "  last  fruits  of  much  endeavour,"  in 
their  particular  sphere,  rather  than  examples  of  that 
process  of  exploration  and  experiment  which  takes  fore- 
most place  in  a  genuine  history.  And  it  may  be  further 
remarked,  in  the  manner  of  general  preliminary,  that,  on 
the  whole,  varied  as  are  the  forms  of  this  lyric,  mere 
variety  is  not  its  chief  feature,  and  that  its  greatest  results 
are  attained  in  one  or  two  well-known  and  long-established 
arrangements.  For  mere  variety,  the  earlier  Elizabethan 
and  the  First  Jacobean  periods  probably  beat  our  present. 
VOL.  II  321  Y 


322     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

And  special      Here,  more  than  anywhere  else,  the  triple  influence  which 

jonson  and      has  for  so  long  been  a  settled  fact  to  all  fairly  intelligent 

Donne.  ancj    Well-read    students,    but  which   is   constantly  being 

advertised  as  a  new  discovery — the  influence  of  Spenser, 

Jonson,  and  Donne — is  exerted.  Here, indeed,  it  culminates. 

But  here,  as  the  peculiarities  of  the  subject  made  necessary, 

the  two  younger  poets  worked  more   strongly  than   the 

eldest.     We    have,  indeed,  in    our    dealings    above  with 

Jonson  and  Donne  themselves,  outlined  a  good  deal  that 

might  have  been  said  here. 

Some  general  Attention  has  been  already  directed  to  the  very 
startling  difference  in  Donne,  and  to  the  less  startling 
but  still  existing  difference  in  Jonson,  between  the  almost 
invariable  smoothness  of  their  lyric  and  the  not  infrequent 
roughness  of  their  other  measures.  A  similar  distinction 
will  be  found,  varying  not  seldom  in  individuals,  but 
constant  on  the  whole,  in  the  very  large  group  which 
we  have  now  to  survey  by  representatives  so  far  as  its 
purely  lyric  constituents  go.  Whether  music  is  here  in 
any  large  part  the  beneficent  agent  or  not  does  not 
matter ;  the  fact  of  prosodic  accomplishment  remains. 
And  the  fact  also  remains  that  this  prosodic  accomplish- 
ment, remarkable  as  it  is  everywhere,  tends,  as  has  been 
said,  to  concentrate  itself  specially  upon  one  or  two  forms 
— the  common  measure,  the  octosyllabic  quatrain,  and  the 
catalectic  iambic-trochaic  dimeter,  either  in  couplet  form 
or  in  arrangements.  The  effects  produced  by  these  are 
positively  miraculous  during  a  space  of  fifty  years  at  the 
outside — at  the  inside  probably  not  much  more  than  five-and- 
twenty.  But  in  variety  and  curiosity  of  lyrical  experiment, 
though  certainly  this  is  not  wanting  in  the  time  of  Herrick 
and  his  mates,  the  period  yields  to  its  predecessor,  and 
still  more  to  the  great  lyrical  revival  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  And  in  one  very  remarkable  respect  it  still 
hangs  back.  It  has  been  too  positively  said  that  for  real 
triple  time — for  measures  not  merely  admitting  the  tri- 
syllabic foot,  but  based  on  it — we  may  seek  in  vain  or 
with  little  result  here  ;  and  it  has  been  too  positively 
replied,  on  the  other  side,  that  this  is  a  mistake.  But  if  the 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  323 

literal  truth  is  rather  with  the  last-named  disputants,  the 
real  is  rather  with  the  first.  There  is  a  certain  amount 
of  anapaestic  verse,  especially  in  the  ballad  or  popular 
division.  But  it  is  seldom  resorted  to  by  the  best  poets  ; 
and  when  they  do  use  it  they  seem  to  think  it  unnecessary 
to  be  careful,  or  necessary  to  be  careless.  It  does  not 
reach  even  the  point  of  excellence  which  we  shall  find 
in  the  later  or  Second  Caroline  division,  to  be  treated  in 
the  next  Book  ;  and  it  never,  or  only  in  the  rarest  flashes, 
comes  anywhere  near  the  splendid  bravura  of  "  Young 
Lochinvar "  or  the  ineffable  poetic  witchery  of  the  great 
Chorus  of  Atalanta  in  Calydon. 

The  subject  will  still  be  best  dealt  with,  for  the  most 
part,  in  our  usual  way  by  surveying  the  work  of  different 
poets  in  order,  partly  chronological,  partly  of  importance. 
But  there  are  some  of  the  special  developments  of  metre 
just  noticed  which  must  be  specially  handled  ;  and  first 
of  the  first — that  marvellous  spiritualising  of  the  "  common 
measure  " — the  eight  and  six  or  broken  fourteener. 

We  have  seen  it  arising  in  Ben  and  in  Donne.  Never,  Special  metres. 
perhaps,  was  there  a  case  more  illustrative  of  the  maxim  c  ^  s 
reculer  pour  mieux  sauter ;  for  the  common  measure,  and 
its  matrix  the  fourteener,  had  been,  as  a  rule,  the  dullest 
and  woodenest  of  First  Elizabethan  forms.  Nor  had  the 
pioneers  of  the  great  stage  done  much  for  it.  But  now 
the  new  wine  fills  the  old  bottle,  not  to  bursting,  but  to  a 
marvellous  transformation  of  its  limp  and  flaccid  outline. 
Of  the  poets  under  the  combined  influence  of  Spenser 
(who  himself  never  tried  it  except  in  the  Kalendar, 
and  the  doggerel  headings  of  the  Faerie  Queene),  Jonson, 
and  Donne,  hardly  one  fails  with  it.  There  is  scarcely 
an  adventurer  from  Herrick  to  Sedley  who  is  not  at  his 
best  when  he  touches  it.  The  exact  mechanical  devices 
of  this  sudden  attainment  of  the  sublime  cannot,  of 
course — they  never  can — be  given  with  actual  certainty. 
They  appear  to  me,  however,  after  long  analysis  of  the 
best  examples  in  all  the  Caroline  poets,  to  be  at  any  rate 
connected  with  a  rather  strict  separation  of  rhythm,  if  not 
of  sense,  at  the  line-ends ;  a  very  careful  selection  of 


324     LATER  JACOBEAN  &-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

strong  and  sonorous  syllables  for  the  "  long  "  places  ;  and 
a  rather  unusual  proportion  of  foot-ending  coincident  with 
word-ending,  so  that  the  beats  of  the  wing  which  is 
achieving  the  "  tower "  are  distinctly  felt.  But  the 
examinations  of  Mercury  will  never  fully  reveal  the  secrets 
of  Apollo. 

L.M.  and  No  very  different  processes  seem  to  effect  the  parallel 

exaltation  of  the  "  long  measure  "  or  octosyllabic  quatrain, 
which,  in  the  one  glorious  example  of  Marvell,  attains  the 
very  highest  place  and  in  many  others  a  place  not  far 
below.  It  must,  however,  always  seem  strange  that  the 
In  Memoriam  variation,  once  reached  by  Jonson  and 
copied  by  Herbert  and  Sandys,  should  not  have  been  more 
widely  cultivated.  We  have  seen  that  Ben  himself  did 
not  fail  to  strike,  though  not  constantly  or  certainly,  the 
true  tone  of  it ;  nor,  as  examples  later  will  show,  did  his 
chief  follower.  But  it  was  seldom  tried  by  any  one  else. 
And  yet  its  special  quality — of  meditative  melancholy 
music — is  easily  adjustable  to  "  metaphysical "  thought. 
It  should  have  allured  poets,  from  Crashaw  and  Vaughan 
to  Kynaston  and  Hall,  as,  according  to  Izaak  Walton,  the 
juice  of  yew-berries  attracts  fish.  The  way,  in  particular, 
in  which  the  second  line  of  the  included  couplet  positively 
invites  epexegesis — added  comment  or  imagery  on  what 
has  gone  before — should  have  been  a  perfect  godsend  to 
them.  But  the  time  was  not  yet. 

The  pure  or  The  special  gift  of  the  iamb,  in  spring  and  soar,  though 

measures^  IC  not  absolutely  limited  to  these  metres,  is  more  particularly 
shown  in  them.  But  the  raising  of  the  trochee  to  a 
higher  power,  which  also  characterises  the  period,  is  very 
much  more  diffused.  In  one  case  it  is  the  line  or  stave 
which  has  special  virtue,  in  the  other  the  foot  itself.  The 
English  trochee  is,  in  fact,  rather  an  uncanny  foot — in  which 
saying  I  am  not  merely  alluding  to  its  latent  tendency  to 
play  Jacob  to  the  iamb's  Esau.  It  is  (let  us  remember 
our  Anglo-Saxon)  Lilith — older  than  Eve,  in  a  manner — 
dethroned  by  her,  but  never  quite  forsaken  ;  "  kittle "  to 
deal  with,  but  of  magical  and  witching  attractions  when 
taken  in  a  kind  and  coming  mood.  There  had  been  a 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  325 


good  deal  of  practice  with  it  in  the  strict  Elizabethan  times, 
mainly  in  the  form  of  the  catalectic  octosyllable  :  we  have 
pointed  out  the  effectiveness  of  it  in  Shakespeare's  lyric 
passages.  It  had,  as  has  been  also  pointed  out,  been  in 
the  same  way  very  largely  practised  in  Jacobean  time  by 
Browne,  Wither,  and  those  about  them,  as  well  as  by 
Fletcher,  while  Ben  himself  has  done  beautiful  work  with  it. 
But  it  was  reserved  for  the  group  of  his  "sons"  and  their 
schoolfellows  to  bring  it  to  the  highest  perfection  ;  and  in 
particular  it  forms  one  of  the  favourite  instruments  of 
Herrick — so  much  so  that  at  this  point  we  may  pass  into 
our  more  usual  method  of  handling,  and  take  poet  by 
poet,  illustrating  metres  and  forms  more  generally  as  the 
opportunity  presents  itself. 

With  Herrick,  indeed,  there  is  a  particular  and  inter- 
esting difficulty  which  is  not  found  quite  to  the  same 
extent  in  any  other  poet.  The  relation  between  style 
and  metre,  or  between  prosody  and  phrase,  is,  of  course, 
always  intimate  and  almost  inextricable.  It  is  especially 
so  at  this  particular  time.  But  not  even  in  Milton  is 
it  so  difficult  to  adjust  the  nice  calculation  of  less  or 
more  in  these  two  respects  as  in  this  elder  in  birth, 
companion  almost  exactly  in  death,  of  whom  we  may 
be  half-glad  and  half-sorry  that  we  have  not  Milton's 
expressed  opinion.  We  must  try,  however,  to  make  the 
sifting. 

In  Herrick's  very  first  lines,1  as  they  meet  us — the  Herrick. 
Dedication  to  Prince  Charles — we  find  something  notably 
metrical — that  he  has  hit  on  the  device  of  the  specially 
emphasised  "  you  "  to  vary  and  "  pedal  "  the  line — a 
device  which  Dryden,  not  so  many  years  afterwards,  was 
to  adopt.  The  fifth  line  of  the  second  Hesperid — 

The  poor  and  private  cottages, 
is  perhaps  an  example  rather  of  phrase  than  of  "  numbers  " 

1  If  I  venture  to  refer  to  my  own  edition  in  the  Aldine  Poets  (2  vols., 
London,  1893)  ^  's  onty  because  I  there  carried  out  what  I  have  always 
desiderated  in  others — the  numbering  of  the  poems  right  through.  Herrick's 
mote-like  cloud  of  poemlets  urgently  demands  this,  though  I  daresay  I  made 
slips  in  it. 


326     LA  TER  JA  CO  BE  AN  &  CAROLINE  POE  TR  Y    BOOK  vi 

in  its  felicity  ;  but  not  so  the  second  of  the  eighth,  a 
famous  thing — 

In  sober  mornings  do  not  thou  rehearse 
The  holy  incantations  of  a  verse, 

where  the  lengthening  out  of  the  words  "  the "  "  holy " 
and  "  incantations  "  shows  the  master  of  harmony  at  once. 
When  a  man  is  avized  of  a  trick  like  this,  he  will  go  far  ; 
and  before  long  he  Jtas  gone  far  in  the  marvellous 
couplets  to  Perilla,  which  end — 

Then  shall  my  ghost  not  walk  about,  but  keep 
Still  in  the  cool  and  silent  shades  of  sleep. 

But  one  might  fill  a  chapter — nay,  a  Book — with  examples 
of  Herrick's  metrical  legerdemain  on  this  system.  We 
must,  alas  !  confine  ourselves  to  specimens  of  it  in  different 
arrangements. 

His  Jonson  combinations,  such  as  No.  106,  in  couplets, 
decasyllabic,  and  octosyllable,  deserve  no  special  notice. 
He  is  better  in  stanzas  like  that  of  the  Southwell  "  Epi- 
thalamie,"  and  still  more  the  justly  famous  "  Corinna 
Maying."  And  the  more  he  shortens  his  individual  line, 
the  better,  as  a  rule,  he  is  ;  for  that  unerring  phrase  of 
his  saves  him  from  the  difficulty  which  most  poets  find 
in  avoiding  awkward  inversions  or  compressions  of  diction 
in  such  circumstances.  The  wonderful  "  To  Violets " 
(No.  205)  is  perhaps  greatest  in  this,  but  there  are  many 
nearly  as  great.  And  in  most  varieties,  as  in  the  most 
famous  of  all,  "  Gather  ye  rosebuds,"  we  shall  find  that 
the  trochee,  either  as  principal  or  as  substitute,  plays  a 
great,  perhaps  the  greatest  part,  of  the  music.  Nowhere, 
perhaps,  does  his  fancy  for  it  appear  more  strikingly  than 
in  the  beautiful 

Charm  me  to  sleep  ;  and  melt  me  so 
With  thy  delicious  numbers — 

the  said  numbers  dwindling  down  to  what  some  would 
call  amphibrachs  ("  My  fever,"  "  'Mongst  roses,"  "  For 
Heaven  "),  but  what  I  should  call  monosyllabic  feet  and 
trochees,  or  catalectic  iambic  monometers,  which  are  the 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  327 

same  thing.  You  clearly  want  the  double  foot.  "  To 
Meadows,"  another  of  the  famous  things,  is  probably  the 
greatest  piece  in  pure  sixes  that  we  have.  I  do  not 
think  that  Herrick  meant  "  flowers  "  and  "  hours  "  in  the 
first  verse  (the  only  "  doubtfuls ")  to  be  dissyllables. 
More  elaborate,  but  perhaps  not  greater  prosodic  art,  is 
shown  by  two  of  its  companions  in  the  general  knowledge, 
"  Fair  Daffodils  "  and  the  "  Night-piece  to  Julia  "  ;  and  it 
is  interesting  to  see  how,  in  both,  the  iambic  and  trochaic 
bases  are  "  legerdemained  "  the  one  into  the  other.  The 
equally  masterly  "  Mad  Maid's  Song  "  has  a  sort  of  sub- 
species of  general  Caroline  common  measure  to  itself: 
the  verses  sob  more ;  they  float  "  on  a  broken  wing," 
to  quote  a  great  parallel  in  matter.  No.  535,  "To 
Electra,"  is  undoubtedly  in  triple  time  ;  but  it  is  not  one 
of  the  best,  and  it  is  very  important  to  notice  that  even 
in  this  the  trisyllabic  feet  are  rather  substituted  than 
staple. 

He  does  not  require  extremely  elaborate  measures. 
I  think  it  may  even  be  said  that  he  does  not  specially 
shine  in  them.  "  The  Wounded  Heart "  (No.  20)  is 
quite  sufficiently  done,  but  would  hardly  be  selected  by 
any  one  as  a  diploma-piece ;  nor  "  His  Answer  to  a 
Question  "  (No.  26).  But  turn  to  the  continuous  hepta- 
syllables  of  "The  Loss  of  his  Mistresses"  (No.  39)  and 
note  the  difference.  If  ever  there  was  an  "  O  of  Giotto  " 
in  the  lighter  prosody,  it  is 

Only  Herrick's  left  alone. 

And  he  seldom  tries  this  metre  without  succeeding  in  it 
perfectly.  In  the  full  iambic  octosyllable  (happy  as  he 
is)  he  is  never  quite  so  happy  ;  but  his  serious  decasyllabic 
couplets  are  quintessential.  Anthea  (see  the  one  quoted 
above,  and  55  and  74)  seems  to  have  had  the  best  of 
them,1  but  they  are  all  choicely  good. 

On  the  other  hand,  in  that  common  measure  which, 
as  has  been  said,  is  the  masterpiece  and  cynosure  of  the 

1  As  she  did  in  the  common  measure  "  Bid  me  to  live,"  and  other  forms.     I 
should  like  to  have  known  Anthea. 


328     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

time,  he  is  less  certainly  happy,  though  at  times  "  past  all 
whooping."  "  The  Rock  of  Rubies,"  which  offended 
Hazlitt  (and  made  him  offend),  has  something  too  much 
of  the  hardness  of  its  subject ;  and  he  can  elsewhere  be 
mechanical  and  even  singsong  in  the  measure.  Yet 
"  Bid  me  to  live "  itself  is  one  of  the  unapproachable 
things — pure  effluence  of  pure  essence  of  prosody. 

In  "  To  his  Valentine "  (No.  94)  we  have  another 
example  of  the  "  Phillida  flouts  me "  problem  (y.  inf.}. 
It  may  be — 

Choose  me  |  your  Va|lentine, 

Next,  let  [  us  mar|ry. 
It  may  be — 

Choose  me  your  |  Valentine, 
Next  let  us  |  marry. 

Both  are  beautiful.  I  am  not  going  to  dictate,  but  it  is 
fair  to  say  that  undoubted  trisyllabic  feet  are  rare  in 
Herrick,  though  they  exist. 

The  two  greatest  things  in  Noble  Numbers,  "  The 
White  Island  "  and  "  The  Litany,"  are  also  its  two  most 
remarkable  prosodic  experiments,  though  there  are  others. 
On  the  whole,  what  has  been  said  of  Herrick  above 
remains  true. 

Carew.  In  the  work  of  his  chief  brother  in  "  the  Tribe,"  Carew, 
while  there  is  a  good  deal  of  similarity  in  prosodic 
atmosphere,  and  especially  in  the  way  in  which  diction 
and  versification  almost  refuse  to  be  distinguished,  and 
quite  refuse  to  be  divorced  from  one  another,  there  is 
one  great  prosodic  difference.  Carew  avoids  almost 
entirely  the  more  eccentric  and  variegated  metrical 
experiments.  The  prosodic  contours  of  his  pages  are 
mostly  level  enough :  there  is  hardly  any  zigzagging  and 
vandyking.  Simple  couplets  or  quatrains,  triplets,  quintets, 
sixains,  serve  him  ;  and  if  he  takes  up  the  fretwork  saw 
in  the  song  "  A  Beautiful  Mistress,"  he  tires  of  it  soon, 
and  relapses  into  regularity.  But  out  of  this  regularity 
he  gets  the  most  marvellous  effects.  He  has  been  accused 
of  artifice,  labour,  sterility,  monotony ;  one  can  only 
borrow  the  famous  and  almost  contemporary  wish,  and 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  329 

sigh  for  more  people  to  be  monotonous,  artificial,  laboured, 
and  sterile  in  this  fashion.  The  heroics  of  the  opening 
piece  are  beautiful,  but  not  exceedingly  ;  the  octosyllabics 
of  the  next,  "  To  A.  L.,"  are  among  those  things  of 
prosody  before  which  it  were  almost  best  to  be  silent — 
so  impossible  is  it  to  analyse  the  secret  of  their  charm, 
and  yet  so  intense  is  the  feeling  of  it.  Only,  one  can 
discern  part  of  the  mystery  in  that  sudden  "  tower  "  which 
the  poets  of  this  period  have  mastered,  and  which  appears 
in  all  their  greatest  things.  Here  Carew  proceeds  for 
some  fifty  verses  or  so,  not  by  any  means  in  a  maundering 
or  wool-gathering,  but  in  a  pleasantly  wandering,  strolling, 
flower-picking  fashion.  And  then  there  is  the  sudden 
explosion  of  passion — 

O  !  love  me  then,  and  now  begin  it ! 
Let  us  not  lose  this  present  minute, 

where  at  the  end  every  vein  of  the  verse  swells,  every 
nerve  quivers. 

I  have  had  frequent  occasions  of  noting  the  singular 
success  of  quintets  when  they  are  successful.  I  wish  I 
had  been  at  Norwich  in  time  to  give  Sir  Thomas  Browne 
a  hint  to  extend  the  Garden  of  Cyrus  in  this  direction. 
And  in  Carew's 

When  thou,  poor  excommunicate,1 

I  could  have  pointed  him  to  certainly  not  the  least  of 
those  which  follow  The  Cuckoo  and  the  Nightingale  in 
various  applications  of  this  number. 

He  has  his  own  variety  of  the  common  -  measure 
triumph  of  the  time  in 

I  was  foretold,  your  rebel  sex, 

where  the  r  and  the  s  will  demonstrate  what  two  bare 
letters  can  do  in  a  line,  and  where  the  final  couplet 

1  When  thou,  poor  excommunicate 

From  all  the  joys  of  love,  shall  see 
The  full  reward,  and  glorious  fate, 

Which  my  strong  faith  shall  purchase  me — 
Then  curse  thine  own  inconstancy.    ' 


330     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

caps  the  double  quatrain  mirifically.1  I  am  not  sure 
that  the  trochaic  sextets  of  "  Disdain  Returned "  are  a 
great  success  ;  though  the  virtue  of  its  sentiments  has 
conciliated  some  admiration.  But  it  is  not  the  fault  of 
the  foot  or  of  Carew's  use  of  it ;  nothing  anywhere  in 
English  can  match  the  trochees  of 

Read  in  these  roses  the  sad  story, 

at  least  in  the  mixed  mode  ;  for  the  iamb  plays  a  pleasant 
chasst-croise  all  through.  The  splendour  of  the  enjambed 
decasyllabics  of  "  The  Rapture "  is  well  known  ;  and 
though  the  poem  may  be  shocking  from  some  points  of 
view,  nothing  shocks  prosody  but  false  quantities  or 
halting  rhythm.  Fortunately  there  is  the  "  Elegy  on 
Donne  "  to  show  the  same  mastery  of  the  same  metre  in 
a  fashion  harmless  to  the  youngest  and  most  inflammable 
of  young  persons,  or  nearly  so.  For  I  am  not  sure  that 
there  is  not  a  tarte  a  la  creme  everywhere  for  those  who 
hanker  after  such  things. 

And  lastly  (for  we  must  not  dwell  too  long  on  a  single 
songster  in  even  this  chorus  of  singing  birds),  Carew's 
best  known  and  most  universally  admired  piece,  "  Ask 
me  no  more,"  though  I  cannot  say  that  it  appeals  to  me 
as  strongly  as  do  a  dozen  others,  shows  his  prosodic 
power  admirably  in  the  rise  and  fall  of  each  stanza.  I 
think  it  is  a  little  artificial,  this  regular  forte  of  the  ques- 
tion couplet  in  each  stanza,  and  piano  of  the  answer,  but 
there  is  no  doubt  that  the  artifice  is  faultless  of  its  kind. 
Crashaw.  The  use  of  the  word  "  tower "  a  little  above  will,  it 
may  be  hoped,  have  suggested  the  name  of  Crashaw  to 
more  than  one  reader  ;  and  certainly  there  is  no  greater 

1  I  was  foretold,  your  rebel  sex 

Nor  love  nor  pity  knew, 
And  with  what  scorn  you  use  to  vex 

Poor  hearts  that  humbly  sue  ; 
Yet  I  believed  to  crown  our  pain, 

Could  we  the  fortress  win, 
The  happy  lover  sure  would  gain 

A  paradise  within. 
I  thought  Love's  plagues  like  dragons  sate, 

Only  to  fright  us  at  the  gate. 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  331 

example  of  that  phenomenon  in  English  prosody — I 
doubt  whether  there  is  so  great  a  one  in  any  other — 
than  the  famous  invocation  of  St.  Theresa,  the  "  rocket  "- 
like  quality  of  which  has  long  ago  been  recognised. 
But  this  remarkable  poet  has  another  prosodic  "  record," 
in  quite  the  opposite  way,  for  his  equally  famous  "  Wishes." 
Carew  is  never  really  playful ;  and  though  Herrick  often 
appears  to  be  so,  it  is  very  serious  playfulness.  Great  as 
both  are  in  their  and  our  way,  it  is  an  artful,  if  not  an 
actually  artificial  greatness.  Crashaw  appears  to  have 
been  a  thoroughly  natural  person  ;  he  could  not,  with  his 
wits,  have  been  guilty  of  the  extravagances  of  "  The 
Weeper  "  if  he  had  not  been.  Compare  him  with  Cowley, 
and  you  will  feel  the  difference  at  once  ;  while  I  am  not 
sure  that  he  has  not  in  this  respect  the  actual  advantage 
over  Suckling.  His  constant  and  very  felicitous  practice, 
sometimes  in  Latin  and  sometimes  even  in  Greek  verse, 
no  doubt  helped  his  English  prosody.1  But  he  has  little 
prosodic  mannerism,  or  rather  he  has  it  in  so  many 
kinds  that  it  is  difficult  to  isolate.  "  The  Tear "  is  like 
Herrick.  Sometimes  he  has  those  prosodic  ambiguities 
or  amphibia  which  have  been  noticed  as  specially  interest- 
ing at  this  time.  For  instance,  the  beautiful  fragment 
on  the  marks  of  Christ's  wounds 2  is  no  doubt  in  intention 
iambic.  But  a  nineteenth-century  Crashaw  could  hardly 
have  prevented  himself  from  moulding  the  lines — 

Are  in  another  sense. 
and  so  on,  as  they  are  arranged  in  the  note,  though  of 

1  And  his  octaves,  from  the  Italian  of  Marino,  are  noteworthy. 

2  What  |  ever  sto|ry  of  their  |  cruelty,  | 
Or  |  nail,  or  thorn,  |  or  spear  have  |  writ  in  thee,  | 
Are  |  in  ano|ther  sense 

Still  |  legible. 
Sweet  |  is  the  dif |  ference  : 
Once  |  I  did  spell  | 
Evjery  red  let|ter 

A  |  wound  of  thine  |  — 
Now  |  (what  is  bet|ter) 
Balsjam  for  mine,  j 

(Poems,  ed.  Waller;  Cambridge,  1904.) 

As  usual,  dactylic  or  amphibrachic  arrangement  is^also  possible. 


332     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOKVI 

course  with  some  alterations.  Every  line,  it  will  be 
observed,  but 

A  wound  of  thine 

goes  well  so,  and  even  that  is  not  hopelessly  refractory 
on  principles  of  substitution. 

George  In    prosody,    as    in    other    things,    Crashaw's    special 

Herbert.  mas|-er)  George  Herbert,  is  difficult  to  write  of  critically, 
without  giving  the  perhaps  uncritical  reader  a  wrong 
impression.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  he  is  rather  good  than 
delicious.  I  do  not,  as  I  have  said  or  hinted  before, 
think  any  the  worse  of  him  for  arranging  Altars  and 
Easter  Wings  of  verse.  I  am  not  with  Mr.  Addison  on 
this  point,  and  a  poet  is  quite  welcome,  for  me,  to  write 
Easter  eggs  of  verse  as  well  as  wings — if  he  likes,  and 
will  make  the  shell  and  white  and  yolk  poetical.  But 
there  is  more  of  the  mechanical  in  Herbert's  prosody  than 
is  shown  merely  by  the  adoption  of  these  mechanical 
forms  ;  and  it  is  only  when  the  fire  of  his  poetry  burns 
hottest  that  inspiration  takes  the  place  of  mechanism. 
Plain  eights,  or  "  long  measure,"  suit  him  as  well  as 
anything — 

I  got  me  flowers  to  straw  Thy  way, 

I  got  me  boughs  off  many  a  tree, 

But  Thou  wast  up  by  break  of  day 

And  broughrst  Thy  sweets  along  with  thee — 

which  (it  may  strike  the  reader)  would  be  better  still  if, 
like  his  brother,  he  had  adopted  the  In  Memoriam  form, 
and  put  line  2  first. 

His  sonnets  are  sometimes  very  good,  and  so  are  many 
of  his  mixed  modes,  especially  a  quatrain  of  8,  10,  10,  8. 
In  fact,  he  is  scarcely  ever  bad  prosodically,  any  more 
than  in  other  ways  ;  but  he  has  not  the  rarest  touch  of 
Vaughan.  his  fellow-disciples,  Crashaw  and  Vaughan.  While  of 
Vaughan  himself  it  may  perhaps  be  said  with  some  truth 
that  the  thought  usually  has  the  upper  hand  of  the  form 
with  him — the  malt  is  above  the  meal.  If  he  wrote  that 
wonderful  anonymous  piece  that  Mr.  Bullen  discovered  in 
the  Christ  Church  library,  he  showed  more  prosodic 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  333 

fingering  there  than  anywhere  else.  Usually  in  his 
finest  and  best  known  things,  "  The  Retreat,"  "  The 
Watch,"  etc.,  the  prosody  is  fully  adequate,  which  is 
saying  a  very  great  deal,  but  it  does  not  attract  attention 
to  itself.  Some  people,  of  course,  would  say  it  should 
not ;  on  which  point  I  give  no  opinion. 

Herbert's  elder  brother,  though  a  very  much  worse  Lord  Herbert 
poet  than  the  author  of  the  Temple,  is  more  interesting  ° 
prosodically,  because  of  his  adoption,  from  Jonson  probably 
but  not  certainly,  of  the  In  Memoriam  metre,  and  of  his 
making  rather  more  progress  with  it  than  Jonson  had 
made  or  than  Sandys  did  make.  The  explanation  of 
his  advance  is  simple — that  he  gave  himself  more  practice 
in  it,  and  that  such  practice,  except  in  the  hands  of  an 
almost  impossible  dullard,  must  necessarily  bring  out  the 
peculiar  qualities  which  are  inherent  in  the  measure.  It 
is  curious  that  his  first  example,  "  The  Ditty,"  is  not 
wholly  of  this  metre,  but,  as  it  were,  settles  down  to  it 
after  a  first  stanza  where  the  last  line  is  a  fourteener,  and 
a  second  which  strikes  out  of  the  form  altogether  into 
one  totally  different.  But  from  the  third  to  the  end  the 
model  is  kept,  and  the  fourth,  despite  a  certain  awkward- 
ness of  phrase,  develops  the  peculiar  bird-sweep,  the 
circular  rise  and  fall,  very  fairly — 

For  whose  affection  once  is  shown, 

No  longer  can  the  world  beguile  ; 

Who  sees  his  penance  all  the  while 
He  holds  a  torch  to  make  her  known. 

But  the  much  longer  "  Ode "  is  uniform  from  the  first, 
and  contains  some  still  better  examples,  with  one  Helot, 
a  stanza  with  double  rhyme  in  the  first  and  fourth,  which 
is  instantly  fatal.1  Herbert  also  tries  what  we  may  call 
the  lengthened  In  Memoriam  (though  in  all  probability 

1  While  doubling  joy  unto  each  other 
All  in  so  rare  consent  was  shewn, 
No  happiness  that  came  alone 
Nor  pleasure  that  was  not  another. 

This,  which  will  be  found  at  p.  94  of  Professor  Churton  Collins's  edition 
(London,  1881),  is  a  curious  and  excellent  example,  showing  how  tottchy  the 
ark  of  prosody  is. 


334     LA  TER  JACOBEAN  6-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

the  true  form  was  actually  shortened  from  it)  in  deca- 
syllabics ;  but  the  subtle  charm  of  the  thing  is  hidden 
here.  That  he  brought  it  out  at  all  is  the  thing,  and  for 
so  doing  one  may  pardon  him  a  good  deal — sophist  and 
coxcomb,  Bobadil  and  something  like  traitor,  as  he  was. 

Still  one  cannot  help  wishing  that  it  had  been  some- 
body else  who  had  hit  on  the  measure.  For  instance, 
who  could  have  brought  out  its  capabilities  much  better 
Marveii.  than  Andrew  Marvell  ?  Marvell  is  a  sort  of  bridge  in 
prosody :  we  shall  have  to  deal  with  his  couplets  in 
the  next  Book  ;  but  the  lyrics  belong  wholly  to  this. 
For  the  (widely)  Elizabethan  power  of  "  fingering " — of 
getting  the  utmost  possible  out  of  metres  borrowed  or 
invented — not  the  greatest  poet  in  English  or  in  literature 
is  Marvell's  superior.  In  that  favourite  and,  as  we  have 
seen,  constantly-practised  measure  of  the  earlier  time,  the 
catalectic  octosyllable,  he  does  not  much  practise  ;  but 
the  full  form  is  his,  almost  in  perfection,  in  the  "  Bilbrough  J> 
and  "  Nun  Appleton  "  poems  of  places,  the  incomparable 
"  Bermudas,"  the  "  Fawn  "  poem,  the  "  Coy  Mistress  "  with 
its  well-known  couplet l — one  of  those  which  strike  a 
certain  terror,  so  "  passionately  and  irretrievably "  does 
the  sound  meet  the  sense — and  others.  In  the  tran- 
scendent common  measure  of  the  period  he  has  not  given 
the  most  transcendent  example  ;  but  in  "  long  measure  " 
he  has  given  the  best  of  all — a  thing  often  referred  to, 
to  be  given  here,  but  above  comment.2  The  "  Horatian 
Ode "  is  a  sort  of  compromise  prosodically  between 
English  and  classical  metre,  a  kind  of  transnotation,  a 
little  artificial,  perhaps,  and  non- natural,  but  how  ex- 
quisite ! 3  "  The  Coronet  "  is  one  of  the  finest  symphonic 

1  And  tear  our  pleasures  with  rough  strife 
Thorough  the  iron  gates  of  life. 

2  My  love  is  of  a  birth  as  rare, 
As  'tis  for  object,  strange  and  high — 
It  was  begotten  of  Despair 
Upon  Impossibility. 

Where  observe  that  part  of  the  secret  is  exactly  the  opposite  to  that  of  the 
common  measure — the  overrunning  of  the  foot  by  the  word-ending. 

3  I  do  not  say  much  about  this  remarkable  piece,  triumph  as  it  is  prosodi- 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  335 

things  of  the  whole  period  since  Spenser,  in  very  long 
stanzas,  almost  of  the  Pindaric  kind.  If,  once  more,  we 
find  a  Donne-like  contrast  in  the  perfect  artistry  of  these 
and  the  roughness  of  his  couplets,  we  shall  not  be  very 
much  surprised. 

But  warning  has  been  given  more  than  once  that  we  The  general. 
must  not  linger  too  long  in  this  island  of  a  harmless 
Alcina — the  Caroline  lyric.  In  the  "  cuttit  and  broken  " 
verse  which  King  James,  in  one  of  his  Solomon-moments, 
had  characterised  as  depending  on  the  invention  of  the 
poet — though  if  he  had  been  quite  Solomonic  he  would 
have  added,  "when  once  the  rhythm  is  implanted  in  the 
general  ear  " — these  men  can  do  almost  anything.  From 
the  best  known  to  the  least,  from  Suckling  and  Lovelace 
to  Kynaston  and  John  Hall,  they  get  prosodic  effects 
which  at  other  times  far  greater  poets  cannot  get  at  all — 
do  not  even  attempt  to  get,  or,  attempting,  fail  miserably. 
They  may  be  mere  reeds  by  the  river ;  yet  the  great  god 
Pan  has  touched  them  and  shaped  them,  and  the  ineffable 
music  follows.  Only  it  is  important  for  us  to  put  in  the 
reminder  that  it  could  not  have  followed  but  for  the 
patient  experiment  of  generations  from  Spenser,  nay 
from  Watt  and  Surrey  onward — that  Pan  is  doing  no 
sudden  miracle  :  that  the  reeds  have  been  planted,  and 
watered,  and  trained,  and  are  no  mere  wildings. 

So  also  it  is  impossible  to  go  through  the  later  song- 
books  and  the  miscellanies  of  the  time  and  point  out 
beauties.  But  even  in  these  there  is  one  famous  piece  on 
which  we  may  pause  a  little,  as  on  an  example. 

"  Phillida    flouts    me," l    indeed,    is   one   of   the   most  Digression 
important  texts  in  the  whole  range  of  our  scriptures  for  flouts  me^'t 
showing,  first,  how  differently  it  is  possible  to  scan  the  foot-division. 
same   collocations,  and,   secondly   and    much   more  also, 

cally,  because  of  its  slight  artificiality.  It  requires  some  assistance  with  the 
voice.  You  can  make  it  a  little  singsong,  if  you  are  profane  enough.  Very 
slow  time  is  required  to  bring  out  its  beauty.  In  fact,  it  is  a  chief  instance  of 
the  "fingering"  above  mentioned. 

1  The  date  of  this  charming  thing  is  very  uncertain.  It  appeared  in  Wit 
Restored  (1657),  but  it  is  probably  much  earlier,  though  whether  earlier  than 
other  examples  of  the  metre  or  not  is  a  question  probably  unanswerable. 


336     LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

how  great  is  the  excellence  of  foot -division  against  a 
mere  counting  of  syllables  on  the  one  hand,  and  of 
"  stresses "  on  the  other.  It  may  possibly  not  have 
occurred  to  everybody — it  was  certainly  many  years 
after  he  was  thoroughly  acquainted  with  both  poems  that 
it  occurred  to  one  person — that  the  metre  of  "  Phillida 
flouts  me"  is  essentially  the  same  on  syllabic,  and  quite 
potentially  the  same  on  accentual  principles,  with  that  of 
Longfellow's  "  Skeleton  in  Armour."  The  disposition  of 
the  lines  is  indeed  slightly  different ;  but  the  lines  them- 
selves are  the  same — one  of  six  syllables  and  one  of  five  ; 
and  for  half  of  each  stanza  the  actual  disposition  is 
identical.  Yet,  putting  the  tune  of  "  Phillida  "  out  of  the 
question,  the  prosodic  movement  is  entirely  different,  and 
nothing  but  foot  -  division  will  exhibit  the  reason  or 
system  of  that  difference.  Syllabically,  there  is  no 
difference  at  all  ;  accentually,  both  may  be  scanned 
almost  at  pleasure  as  "  two-stress  "  or  "  three-stress  "  lines. 
Justifications  of  all  these  statements  will  be  found  below ; l 
but  one  of  the  arrangements  will  utterly  destroy  the 
plaintive  dropping  "  innocence "  (in  both  senses)  of 
"  Phillida,"  and  both  will  rob  the  "  Skeleton "  of  its 
martial  and  stormy  sweep.  To  get  the  former  you  must 
scan  "  Phillida  "  in  the  longer  lines  as  a  dactylic  or  a 

1  Oh  !   |  what  a  |  pain  is  |  love,  And  |  as  to  catch  |  the  gale, 

How  |  shall  I  |  bear  it  ?  Round  |  veered  the  flap  |  ping  sail ; 

will  in  |  constant  |  prove,  Death  |  was  the  helmsjman's  hail, 


She 

I 


greatly  |  fear  it.  Death  |  without  quar  |  ter  ! 


Mid  |  ships  with  i  ron  keel 
Please  |  her  the  |  best  I  |  may,  Struck  |  we  her  ribs  |  of  steel, 

She  |  looks  ajnother  |  way,  Down  |  her  black  hulk  |  did  reel 

A  |  lack  and  |  well-a-|day,  Through  |  the  black  wa|ter  ! 

Philllida  I  flouts  me.  ~      ,, 

On   the  other   hand,   pure   iambic 

scansion,    which    the    stress    system 
Oh  I  what  a  |  pain  is  |  love,  etc.         invites   (and  which   would   make  of 

„,,  ,      „  , .    ,    .  the  opening    of  Phillida    a    kind    of 

The  second  syllable  being  common —  ,          ,,  ,, °   ,     ,  .iU        ,      , 

3    ,.  °  decasyllabic    broken,    with    redund- 

or  rather  depending  much  on  the  time  .   .      ,-        ,  „, 

r-    t  &  .  .,.  ance,  into  6  and  5),  utterly  destroys 

given  to  the  first— and  so  yielding  a  jjOtn_ 

dactylic   start    throughout.       I    need 

hardly  ask   the  reader  to   remember  _^        —    .        — .        ,     w 

Drayton  and  Agincourt  in  this  con-  Oh  what  I  a  ?am  i  1S  love' 

nection.  w  _       w    _  w   _ 

And  as  j  to  catch  |  the  gale. 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  337 

trochaic  with  short  monosyllabic  foot  appended  ;  and  you 
must  take  as  the  shorter  lines  dactyl  plus  trochee,  or  two 
trochees  separated  by  a  short  monosyllabic  foot  To  get 
the  latter  you  must  rely  on  the  central  anapaest,  with  an 
anacrusis  of  one  strong  monosyllable,  and  an  iamb,  or  mono- 
syllabic foot  alternately  on  the  other  side.  If  Longfellow 
had  carried  out  this  principle  in  his  hexameters,  and  let 
them  fall  into  the  same  movement  with  four  anapaests  in 
the  middle  instead  of  one,  the  namby-pambiness  of 
Evangeline  would  not  exist. 

I  think  it  may  be  not  impertinent  to  lay  a  little 
further  stress  on  the  importance  of  this  instance  in  the 
argument  for  foot-division.  On  the  strict  syllabic  calculus 
there  is,  as  has  been  shown,  no  difference  in  the  metre 
of  the  two  poems  ;  on  the  strict  accent,  stress,  or  beat 
system  there  need  be  none  ;  and  there  is  none  on  a  very 
sufficient  construction  of  both.  But  when  the  require- 
ment of  feet — of  the  attachment  of  unstressed,  unaccented, 
unbeaten  "short"  syllables  to  the  stresses,  accents,  beats, 
or  "  long "  syllables  in  certain  schemes — is  met,  then  the 
difference — the  true  difference,  the  difference  correspond- 
ing to  nature  and  effect — emerges.  It  is  the  same,  but 
in  much  more  striking  measure  or  degree,  as  the  difference 
between  the  two  scansions  of  Coleridge's  pattern  hexa- 
meter-elegiac and  of  Boadtcea,  referred  to  at  vol.  i.  p.  8. 
And  I  must  again  urge  that  the  syllabic  system  and  the 
stress  system  have  no  means  of  terminology,  no  device 
of  any  other  kind,  for  indicating  the  nature  of  this 
attachment.  The  evasive  phrase  of  "  rising  "  and  "  falling  " 
is  utterly  inadequate.  Our  system  and  our  terminology  can 
do  it  without  effort — and  will  do  it  as  a  matter  of  course. 
It  is  no  doubt  possible  that  there  are  some  ears  so  con- 
stituted that  they  do  not  hear  the  feet  in  their  actual 
composition  ;  but  they  must  be  passed  by.1 

It  is  possible  that  some  readers  may  be  surprised  at  "Pindaric, 
not  finding  "  Pindaric  "  verse  estated  in  a  chapter  to  itself ; 

1  In  connection  with  "  Phyllida,"  I  should  like  to  refer  students  to  Mr. 
Ker's  paper  on  the  Arte  Mayor  (v.  sup.  i.  p.  408  note),  though  I  must  post- 
pone the  application. 

VOL.  II  Z 


338     LATER  JACOBEAN  &•  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  v 

but  such  a  chapter  would  suit  awkwardly  with  strictly 
historical  method,  and  would  be  more  appropriate  to  that 
of  kinds,  which  others  use.  So  envisaged,  it  would  have 
to  begin  with  Spenser  and  end  with  Mr.  Swinburne, 
which  would  not  suit  us.  It  is,  however,  at  our  present 
point  and  in  our  present  chapter,  of  sufficient  importance 
to  demand  a  section  of  rather  more  than  ordinary  "  self- 
containedness,"  though  we  shall  not  find  it  necessary  here 
to  deal  with,  or  to  illustrate  from,  any  poet  except  Cowley. 
The  degradations  of  the  style  in  the  later  part  of  the 
seventeenth  century  belong  to  the  next  Book,  together 
with  its  partial  rescue  at  the  hands  of  Dryden  ;  the 
eighteenth -century  exercises  in  it,  and  the  attempts  of 
Gray  to  raise  them,  to  the  last  of  this  volume. 

its  use  in  Although  the  Pindaric  movement  is  rightly  and  indis- 

nature7' ar  ^  solubly  associated  with  the  name  of  Cowley,  it  would  be 
a  great  mistake — an  even  greater  one  than  is  common  in 
such  cases — to  regard  him  as  its  only  begetter.  That  it 
should  have  specially  commended  itself  to  him  is,  indeed, 
no  wonder.  It  suited  that  restless  and  enterprising,  but 
rather  facile,  eclecticism  which  was  partly  displayed  in 
the  last  chapter  ;  and  he  probably  thought  that  he  might 
find  in  it  something  of  a  refuge  from  the  see-saw  between 
"  metaphysicalism "  and  "  prose  and  sense "  which  we 
notice  in  him  so  often.  But  he  would  not  have  drawn 
after  him  anything  like  the  portion  of  the  poetic  (or  at 
least  versifying)  host  that  he  did  draw,  if  it  had  appealed 
merely  to  his  private  idiosyncrasies.  There  were  other  and 
important  inducements  to  it,  which  were  public  and  general. 
The  induce-  In  the  first  place,  and  affecting  not  merely  England, 

but  a^  Europe,  there  was  that  odd  devotion  to,  or  at 
least  belief  in,  furor  poeticus^  which  was  accepted  by  the 
latest  sixteenth  and  all  the  seventeenth  century  as  safety- 
valve  or  sauce  for  the  equally  accepted  doctrines  of  poetic 
rule  and  reason.  You  were  allowed  to  be  mad  ;  it  was 
creditable  for  you  to  be  mad  ;  and  under  whose  auspices 
could  you  be  mad  so  respectably  as  under  those  of  the 

1  I  must  refer  to  the  numerous  passages  on  this  subject  in  my  History  of 
Criticism,  vol.  ii.  (Edinburgh  and  London,  1902). 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  339 

"  Theban  eagle  "  ?  But  this  consideration  was  not  specially 
prosodic  or  specially  English ;  there  were  others  that 
were  both.  In  the  first  place,  we  can  trace  all  along  the 
century,  from  Drayton  to  Bysshe,  a  certain  growing 
weariness  of  the  stanza,  or  at  least  of  the  chief  recognised 
stanzas.  Rhyme-royal  was  almost  sure  to  die  down  for 
a  time  after  its  long  and  partly  glorious  history  of  nearly 
three  hundred  years.  Its  nearest  rival,  the  octave,  has 
always  been  something  of  an  alien — a  visitor  welcome, 
but  not  exactly  naturalised — in  English.  The  very 
splendour  and  completeness  of  the  success  of  the 
Spenserian  seem  to  have  daunted  imitators  :  as  we  have 
seen,  they  took  everything  from  Spenser  except  his 
stanza,  and  made  clumsy  alterations  of  that  The 
quatrain  was  to  be  tried  almost  simultaneously  with  the 
Pindaric — and  to  fail.  In  fact,  it  is  quite  clear  that  the 
age  was  losing  its  taste  for  stanzas  of  all  kinds  except 
in  lyric  of  moderate  size.  On  the  other  hand,  fast  as  it 
was  settling  towards  the  couplet,  it  had  not  yet  definitely 
made  up  its  mind  which  of  the  two  forms  of  this  it  would 
prefer :  and  Cowley  at  least  was  a  man  of  prosodic  brains 
and  prosodic  practice,  both  more  than  sufficient  to  tell 
him  that  the  couplet's  danger  was  monotony  for  the 
reader  and  cramp  for  the  writer. 

Now  the  irregular  Pindaric  stanzas  and  lines,  lengthened  its  intrinsic 
or  shortened  at  the  pleasure  and  judgment  of  the  poet,  attractlons- 
and  both  adjustable  to  a  poem  of  almost  any  moderate 
length — that  is  to  say,  to  any  of  the  "  occasional  "  subjects 
which  were  more  and  more  appealing — might  seem  to  be 
free  from  all  objections,  and  to  promise  all  sorts  of  com- 
modities. No  form  of  cramp,  whether  of  those  incidental 
to  the  couplet  or  of  those  incidental  to  the  shorter  but 
regular  and  identical  stanza,  seemed  to  threaten  them. 
They  invited,  without  exactly  imposing,  the  favourite 
and  fashionable  metaphysical  exaltation,  digression,  par- 
enthesis. They  suggested  the  variety  and  the  sweetness 
of  rhyme  without  tying  the  poet  down  to  the  necessity 
of  giving  it  at  absolutely  regular  intervals.  Their  harmony 
fell  in  with  the  musical  tastes  of  the  time  ;  in  fact,  they 


340     LATER  JACOBEAN  &*  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

were  in  manner  larger  lyrics — lyrical  "  magnums."  As 
for  patterns,  not  merely  Pindar  himself  and  the  Greek 
choruses  (troublesome  strophic  arrangement  being  prudently 
dropped),  but  the  Italian  canzone,  Spenser's  own  two 
great  odes,  and  other  things  presented  themselves.  Nor, 
in  fact,  to  any  one  of  very  moderate  versifying  faculty 
were  special  patterns  in  the  least  necessary.  The  general 
rhythm  of  English  prosody  having  been  by  this  time 
sufficiently  established,  only  individual  incapacity  could 
go  far  wrong.  A  fifteenth-century  Pindaric  is  a  thing 
too  awful  to  think  of ;  though,  in  fact,  not  a  few  fifteenth- 
century  rhyme-royal  stanzas  are  like  small  Pindaric  strophes 
written  by  a  bad  poet  and  stupid  man.  But  there  was 
no  such  danger  in  the  seventeenth,  except  that  the 
individual  stupidity  would,  of  course,  have  its  way  in  this 
form  or  that. 

its  history.  That  Cowley  says  nothing  of  all  this  (or  practically 
nothing)  in  his  actual  Preface  to  his  Pindaric  Odes  will 
surprise  no  sensible  reader.  From  his  words  you  might 
think  that  he  began  by  translating  two  actual  Odes  of 
Pindar  into  something  more  or  less  resembling  their 
original  form  in  English,  and  then  was  tempted  to  extend 
the  practice  to  original  composition.  Very  likely  this 
was  the  actual  conscious  historical  genesis  of  the  matter 
in  his  case.  But  the  order  of  conscious  thought  and  the 
order  of  actual  evolution  are  pretty  notoriously  not 
identical ;  and,  as  I  must  again  and  again  remind  readers, 
there  is  perhaps  no  case  in  which  they  need  have  coincided 
less  than  in  prosody.  It  is  sufficient  that  Cowley  did 
adopt  these  irregular  semi-lyrical  stanzas  or  paragraphs  ; 
that  they  almost  immediately  "  made  a  school " ;  that 
they  produced,  during  the  last  half  of  the  seventeenth 
century  and  much  of  the  eighteenth,  some  of  the  very 
worst  verse  (poetically,  not  always  prosodically)  to  be 
found  in  the  English  language ;  but  that,  though  again 
and  again  corrected  into  Greek  form  by  poets  who  were 
also  scholars,  they  have  practically  maintained  themselves 
to  the  present  day,  and  have  shown  themselves  quite  as 
able  to  provide  a  poet  with  wings  to  soar  as  they  are  to 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  341 

provide  a  poetaster  with  weights  to  sink.  In  fact,  inter- 
esting as  some  of  the  regularly  strophic  arrangements l  are, 
it  may  be  doubted  whether  English  is  not  of  the  "  rebel 
sex "  in  poetry,  and  does  not  take  such  things  rather 
impatiently.  At  any  rate,  it  is  a  very  significant  fact 
that  Milton,  a  scholar  if  ever  there  was  one,  the  possessor 
of  an  ear  the  infallibility  of  which  was  only  limited  by 
his  nonconformist  temper  and  his  unconquerable  tendency 
to  experiment,  a  craftsman  able  to  do  almost  anything 
he  liked  with  "  numbers,"  did  not  adopt  strict  correspond- 
ence of  form  in  Lycidas,  or  even  in  Samson  Agonistes. 

As  for  Cowley  himself,  it  is  of  course  very  easy  to  Cowiey's  own 
show  that  his  Odes  are  "  not "  several  things  ;  and  most  pra 
particularly  that  they  are  not  Pindaric  or  choric,  being 
usually  an  uncertain  number  of  irregular  stanzas,  corre- 
sponding to  one  another  neither  in  number  nor  in  position 
of  line,  and  arranged  on  no  system  of  rhyme-tally.  But 
this,  apart  from  the  question  of  mere  nomenclature  (and 
even  perhaps,  to  some  extent,  in  respect  of  that),  is  a 
merely  technical,  not  to  say  a  merely  pedantic,  objection. 
Take  them  for  what  they  are,  not  for  what  they  are  not, 
and  it  is  impossible  to  deny  them  great  capabilities,  which, 
in  their  very  form,  Dryden  was  to  develop  admirably  in 
the  "  Mrs.  Anne  Killigrew  "  especially,  and  which,  whether 
as  regulated  by  Gray  and  Collins  or  remodelled  afresh 
by  the  poets  of  the  nineteenth  century,  were  to  add 
vastly  to  the  stores  of  English  poetry.  Here,  as  else- 
where, Cowley  wants  the  anecdotic  "  that —  !  "  As  in  the 
Davideis,  he  accumulates  and  agglomerates  fine  things, 
and  things  not  fine  at  all — harmonies  and  cacophonies, 
curiosities  and  mere  oddities,  in  the  most  pell-mell  fashion. 
As  in  the  Lyrics — and  this  is  specially  important  and 
unfortunate — his  irregular  schematisation  is  merely  hit 
or  miss,  it  may  "come  off"  or  not  come  off,  almost  at 
the  hazard  of  the  dice.  Yet  it  makes  one  think  of  some 
of  its  author's  own  words.  It  is  a  "  large  garden  "  to  the 

1  They  date,  the  reader  may  be  reminded,  back  to  Ben  Jonson  at  least, 
and  were  attempted  by  Cowley.  Congreve's  essays  in  them  are  in  front 
of  us. 


342      LATER  JACOBEAN  &-  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

"  small  house  "  of  the  couplet,  and  it  afforded  an  invalu- 
able place  of  escape,  and  exercise,  and  contemplation  of 
nature  to  those  whom  the  couplet  cramped  and  confined. 
The  decay  of  We  may  conclude  the  chapter  with  a  few  further 
ThiTquatrain.  words  on  the  curious  phenomenon  which  was  noticed 
above,  which  will  be  found  glanced  at  in  the  only  prosodic 
document  of  the  period,  and  which  is  one  of  its  most 
important  historically — the  growth  of  discontent  with 
stanza.  Of  course,  there  are  plenty  of  long  poems  of  the 
time  which  use  this — Kynaston's  Leoline  and  Sydanis, 
More's  and  Joseph  Beaumont's  great  philosophical 
treatises,  numerous  others.  Nor  is  there  much  return, 
if  any,  to  the  disorder  of  the  fifteenth -century  rhyme- 
royal — a  disorder  which  is  practically  reproducing  itself 
in  blank  verse.  The  mere  stanza  forms,  now  that  some 
general  sense  of  rhythm  was  diffused,  were  sufficient  to 
prevent  that.  But  the  longing  for  the  "  geminell,"  which 
discloses  itself  in  those  curious  observations  of  Drayton's 
long  before,  almost  inevitably  brings  distaste  of  the 
symphonic  forms  with  it.  If  they  end  in  a  couplet,  why 
not  have  the  couplet  alone  ?  If  they  do  not,  why  don't 
they  ?  That  seems  to  have  been  the  unspoken  drift  of 
the  thought  of  the  time,  indicating  itself  even  in  such  an 
apparently  contradictory  symptom  as  the  Pindaric  :  indi- 
cating itself  directly  in  the  contraction  of  the  stave  to 
a  mere  quatrain  in  the  first  place,  as  a  preliminary  to 
reduction  to  the  lowest  term  short  of  blank  verse.  The 
principal  example  of  this,  Davenant's  Gondibert,  belongs 
in  time  to  the  present  Book  and  chapter,  but  the  discussion 
of  the  measure  had  best  take  place  when  we  come  to  its 
greatest  practitioner,  Dryden.  Davenant,  whose  curious 
reasons  for  choosing  it  are  noted  elsewhere,  manages  it 
with  fair  skill,  but  certainly  does  not  evade  or  conquer 
its  defects. 

The  chief  of  these  is  the  peculiarly  soporific  effect — 
an  effect,  as  we  shall  see,  not  fully  evaded  or  conquered 
by  Dryden  himself — of  the  form  when  repeated  uni- 
formly or  at  great  length.  Gondibert  might  have  been 
a  prose  heroic  romance  of  some  interest ;  as  a  verse  one 


CHAP,  iv  CAROLINE  LYRIC,  PINDARIC,  AND  STANZA  343 

(putting  poetry  out  of  the  question)  it  is  almost  more  diffi- 
cult to  read  than  its  contemporary  and  rival  Pharonnida, 
though  Davenant  tells  his  story  clearly  enough,  and 
Chamberlayne  with  an  almost  total  absence  of  clarity.1 

1  The  experiments  in  new  short  stanzas,  such  as  the  excessively  awkward 
IO,  8,  12  of  Benlowes'  Theophila,  point  the  moral. 


CHAPTER    V 

PROSODISTS 

Barrenness  of  the  compartment — Jonson  a  defaulter — Joshua  Poole 

or  "J.  D." 

Barrenness  of  THIS  chapter  will  probably  be  the  shortest  of  the  volume, 
except  the  corresponding  one  in  the  next  Book,  yet  it 
is  not,  nor  is  that,  introduced  merely  for  the  sake  of  sym- 
metry. That  after  the  very  considerable  interest  taken 
in  many  if  not  all  questions  relating  to  poetry  during 
the  Elizabethan  period  proper,  there  should  be,  during  a 
period  so  closely  united  with  it  in  poetical  practice,  an 
almost  total  disuse  of  poetic  theorising,  may  seem  odd. 
But  there  is  no  doubt  that,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  first 
half  of  the  seventeenth  century  with  us  is  exceptionally 
barren  in  all  kinds  of  critical  exercise,  and  most  barren 

jonson  a  in  prosody.  Jonson,  the  principal  exception  in  criticism 
generally,  had  intended  to  be  an  exception  here  also. 
At  the  beginning  of  his  unfinished  English  Grammar  he 
not  only,  as  he  was  by  tradition  almost  bound  to  do, 
glances  at  prosody,  and  makes  a  distinction  between 
English  and  the  classical  languages  in  point  of  quantity, 
but  promises  something  of  a  discussion  "  in  the  heel  of 
the  book."  That  heel,  however,  played  him  or  us  a 
worse  trick  than  did  the  heel  of  Achilles  ;  for  it  never, 
so  far  as  we  know,  came  into  being  at  all.  One  naturally 
regrets  this  ;  for  a  prosodic  treatise  from  the  man  who 
not  merely  was  a  great  master  of  the  practice,  but  who 
thought  Fraunce  a  fool  for  writing  in  quantity,  and  Donne 
worthy  of  hanging  for  not  keeping  accent,  ought  to  have 

344 


CHAP,  v  PROSOD1STS  345 

had    something  worth    reading  in    it.      Yet,  after  all,  it 
might  have  been  disappointing. 

There  is,  however,  one  exception  l  late  in  the  period 
and  itself  rather  enigmatic,  but  curiously  "  up  to  date " 
and  therefore  important.  In  the  first  half  of  the  century 
there  lived  a  certain  Joshua  Poole  whose  birth-date  is 
unknown,  but  who  was  entered  at  Clare  Hall,  Cambridge, 
in  1632,  and  appears  to  have  passed  the  final  years  of 
his  life  up  to  1 646,  when  he  died,  as  master  of  a  private 
school  at  Hadley  near  Barnet,  which  had  been  set  up 
by,  and  in  the  house  of,  a  certain  Francis  Atkinson.  To 
this  Francis  Atkinson  he  dedicated  a  book  called  The 
English  Parnassus^  which,  however,  did  not  appear  for 
ten  years  after  his  death.2 

Ungracious  as  it  may  seem,  it  has  to  be  said  that  Joshua  Poole 
this  Joshua  so  far  as  he  himself  is  concerned,  leaves  us  or 
completely  in  the  wilderness.  His  book  (evidently 
suggested  by  those  of  Fabricius,  Mazzone  da  Miglionico, 
and  others  on  the  Continent)  is  an  English  gradus, 
giving  a  dictionary  of  rhymes,  another  of  epithets  for 
leading  words,  and  a  third  part  containing  no  uninterest- 
ing, but  to  us  no  important,  anthology  of  illustrative 
passages.  It  is,  in  fact,  one  of  the  (except  indirectly) 
mischievous  "  Poetry-made-easies "  with  which  we  have 
nothing  to  do.  But  when  it  appeared,  it  appeared  with 
a  second  Preface  "  being  a  Short  Illustration  of  English 
Poesy,"  with  which  we  have  a  great  deal  to  do,  and 
which  has  been  rather  strangely  neglected.  This  Preface 
is  signed  "  J.  D.,"  and  it  will  naturally  be  asked  who  this 
J.  D.  was.  There  is  unfortunately  not  the  faintest  scrap 
of  evidence  on  the  subject.  It  is,  of  course,  impossible 

1  We  need  hardly  make  one  for  Davenant,  though  he  has  one  paragraph 
in  his  long  Preface  touching  on  his  stanza — the  decasyllabic  quatrain.      He 
thought  it  would  be  less  tiresome  to  the  reader  than  the  couplet,  and  less  to 
the  singer  or  composer  than  the  stanza.     For  he  seems  actually  to  have  hoped 
that  this  long  poem  would  be  sung,  as  Hannay  seems  also  to  have  done  with 
his  not  quite  so  long  and  more  lyrical  but  still  exorbitant  Philomela.     The 
fact  is  curious.     Nor  need  more  than  mention  be  given  to  the  slight  refer- 
ences of  Wallis  to  the  classical  metre  craze  in  his  Grammatica  Lingua  Angli- 
cans (1653). 

2  The  first  edition  (London,   1656,  or   1657?)  appears  to  be  extremely 
rare.     Of  the  second  (1677)  I  have  a  copy. 


346     LATER  JACOBEAN  &•  CAROLINE  POETRY    BOOK  vi 

not  to  think  of  John  Dryden,  who,  like  Poole,  was  a 
Cambridge  man  ;  who  was  five  or  six  and  twenty  at 
the  time  ;  who  had  long  before  written  the  "  Hastings  " 
lines  ;  who  had  just  taken  up,  or  was  just  going  to  take 
up,  his  residence  in  London  ;  who  was  about  to  write 
his  first  characteristic  poem  on  Oliver  Cromwell  ;  and 
who  is  traditionally,  though  not  very  trustworthily, 
asserted  to  have  done  more  or  less  hack-work  for  the 
booksellers  about  this  time.  But,  except  the  chrono- 
logical and  circumstantial  one,  there  is  no  link  between 
Dryden  and  J.  D.  whatsoever.  The  style  is  not  in  the 
least  like  his,  and  there  is  (with  one  very  trifling  excep- 
tion to  be  noted  presently)  no  connection,  that  I  at  least 
can  discover,  of  reading,  allusion,  or  opinion. 

Still,  J.  D.  is  not  to  be  neglected ;  he  gives  us,  in  fact, 
our  only  important  and  detailed  document  between 
Daniel  and  Bysshe.  He  flourishes  a  little  to  begin  with, 
but  at  least  endeavours  to  come  to  close  quarters  by 
adding  to  his  statement  that  "  harmony  in  prose  [a 
faint  remembrance  of  Dryden's  "  other  harmony  of  prose  " 
arises]  consists  in  exact  placing  of  the  accent,  and  an 
accurate  disposition  of  the  words  "  ;  that  "  poesy  consists, 
besides,  in  measure,  proportion,  and  rhythm."  He  knows 
Sidney,  Daniel,  and  Puttenham's  book  (though  not  as 
Puttenham's) ;  and  he  even  knows  the  examples  of 
fifteenth-century  poetry  which  Ashmole  had  just  published 
in  the  Theatrum  Chemicum.  He  has  no  delusions  about 
"  Spondey  [sic]  and  dactyl,"  and  quotes  the  person  who 
sent  Ben  Jonson  a  copy  of  verses  beginning  thus — 

Benjamin  immortal,  Johnson  most  highly  renowned — 

which,  by  the  way,  is  quite  as  good  as  most  of  its  kind. 
And  he  notes  (which  is  quite  noteworthy)  that  "  all  kind 
of  historical  poesy  was  performed  by  most  of  the 
European  languages  in  stanzas  till  of  late"  He  describes 
other  kinds  from  lyric  to  didactic,  and  then  turns 
to  symphony  and  cadence.  He  objects  to  rhymes 
of  different  accent  ("  nature "  and  "  endure ") ;  to  long 
parentheses  ;  to  the  contemporary  enjambment  (for  which 


CHAP,  v  PROSODISTS  347 

he  has  no  word,  but  which  he  illustrates),  and,  very 
strongly,  to  apostrophes  and  words  "  apostrophated  " — 
an  objection  priceless  to  us ;  also  to  double  rhymes, 
which  he  thinks  "  speak  a  certain  flatness  derogatory  to 
the  dignity  of  the  Heroic  "  ;  to  polysyllables  ;  to  rough 
rhythm  (he  quotes  Sir  Thomas  Urquhart) ;  to  identical 
rhyme ;  to  assonance  and  to  gradus- epithets,  wherein 
it  may  be  thought  that  he  galled  the  kibe  of  the  defunct 
Joshua's  heel  somewhat.  But  here  he  stops,  or  merely 
goes  on  to  give  some  details  about  Joshua  himself. 

I  think  a  good  deal  more  nobly  of  this  than  some 
have  done — in  fact,  than  anybody  has  done,  so  far  as  I 
am  aware.  It  is  not,  of  course,  very  durchgehend :  it  is 
(and  I  confess  this  is  part  of  its  interest  to  me)  rather 
like  an  intelligent  article  on  the  book  and  subject,  by 
somebody  who  was  turned  on  for  the  purpose  ;  and  I 
daresay  it  was  this.  But  it  at  least  shows  that  the 
writer  knew  something,  had  thought  something,  and  had 
observed  something  in  regard  to  that  subject ;  and  of 
such  things  in  these  early  days  we  have  astonishingly 
little.  He  fixes  on  the  great  and  crying  evil  of  "  apostro- 
phation,"  which  was  to  become  all  the  more  mischievous 
because  it  was  to  drop  some  of  its  warning  deformities. 
He  is  aware  of  the  other  evil  of  excessive  and  slovenly 
enjambment.  It  is  perhaps  necessary  to  have  read  more 
verse  of  the  time  than  most  people  have  read  to  know 
that  the  danger  of  allowing  mere  assonance  was  much 
greater  than  is  commonly  thought,1  and  he  protests 
against  this.  He  was  right  about  the  danger  of 
numerous  double  rhymes  ;  and,  again,  it  was  a  pressing 
danger  of  his  time.  He  presents,  in  all  these  respects,  a 
curious  contrast  by  anticipation  to  the  a  priori  prosodists 
of  the  eighteenth  century  with  whom  we  shall  have  to 
deal  towards  the  close  of  this  volume,  and  who,  when 
they  take  account  of  English  poetry  at  all,  too  often 
seem  to  think  that  nothing  but  the  existing  practice  of 

1  To  take  a  single  writer,  and  not  a  bad  one,  Shakerley  Marmion  in  Cupid 
and  Psyche  rhymes  "borw"  and  "  forw,"  "ocea«"  and  "swaw,"  even 
"ascribed"  and  "denied." 


348    LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY     BOOKVI 

it  is  to  be  taken  into  account,  and  give  no  intelligent 
consideration  even  to  that.  In  short,  while  they  were 
blind,  he  was  at  least  one-eyed  and  saw  with  his  one 
eye.  Now  we  know  in  what  kingdom  the  one-eyed  man 
is  king  ;  and,  once  more,  for  prosodic  discussion,  if  not 
prosodic  practice,  this  seventeenth  century  is  a  most 
remarkable  Royaume  des  aveugles. 


INTERCHAPTER    VI 

IT  is  of  the  first  importance  that  we  should  look  round 
and  "  collect,"  at  the  point  which  we  have  now  reached. 
The  annus  magnus,  the  larger  period  of  Elizabethan 
poetry,  has  ended,  or  is  ending,  and  an  entirely  new 
dispensation,  prosodically  as  well  as  otherwise,  is  be- 
ginning or  has  begun.  Prosodically,  as  poetically,  the 
Pisgah -sight  backwards  about  1660  —  even  without 
Milton's  latest  work — is  of  quite  astoundingly  developed 
range,  variety,  and  beauty,  as  compared  with  any  such 
survey  possible  about  1580.  In  fact,  Pisgah  has  changed 
its  place,  and  is  not  on  the  threshold  of  the  Promised 
Land,  but  on  its  farther  limit.  But  for  us  the  goodly 
heritage  is  less  an  object  of  contemplation  than  the  way 
in  which  it  has  been  occupied. 

The  points,  to  speak  without  any  metaphor,  to  which 
attention  has  to  be  directed  in  the  period  of  the  last 
Book  are :  the  position  of  lyric  ;  the  decadence  of  blank 
verse  and  of  the  stanza ;  the  advance,  in  a  certain 
direction,  of  the  couplet ;  and  (changing  the  principle  of 
arrangement)  the  work  of  Milton.  Something  has  been 
said,  even  of  the  general  kind,  on  each  of  these  points 
already  ;  but  we  must  now  bring  the  generalities  together. 

The  condition  of  lyric  brings  out  for  us  a  most 
important  era  or  epoch  in  prosodic  history.  We  here 
reach  a  point  where  the  prosodic  possibilities  of  a  given 
time  are  fully  developed — where  you  can  "  get  no  more 
of  them."  The  poet  has  his  instrument  in  absolute 
perfection,  ready  to  his  hand  ;  and,  so  long  as  he  has  the 
power  to  use  it,  his  performance  is  absolutely  perfect  also. 

349 


350        LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY      BOOK 

Instead  of  having — as  Wyatt,  for  instance,  had  had — 
plenty  of  power  to  play,  but  an  instrument  breaking 
down  under  his  hand  at  every  moment,  he  has  one  which 
is  mechanically  perfect,  which  leaves  nothing  to  desire  in 
the  doing  of  its  part,  and  which  merely  leaves  him  to  do 
his.  It  is,  in  fact,  so  perfect  as  an  instrument  that  com- 
paratively little  power  is  necessary  to  bring  out  its  effects 
up  to  a  certain  point — though  the  greater  the  power,  of 
course,  the  better. 

There  are  sufficient  reasons,  besides  the  rather  Molier- 
esque,  and  more  than  rather  unphilosophical  (yet  not 
perhaps  quite  irrational)  reason,  that  the  virtue  of  the 
time  was  lyrical,  why  this  perfection  should  be  specially 
shown  in  lyric.  One  perhaps  is  that  lyric  is,  after  all,  the 
central,  the  highest,  the  most  natural  and  essential  form 
of  poetry ;  so  that  the  more  poetical  a  time  is  the  better 
will  it  show  in  lyric,  and  the  more  favourable  the 
mechanical  aids  and  circumstances,  the  better  will  lyric 
show  in  them.  But  it  is  possible  to  be  more  precise,  and 
also  more  "  in  our  own  division,"  than  thus.  In  the  first 
place,  there  had  been  from  Wyatt  to  Shirley  more  than  a 
century  and  a  quarter,  from  Spenser  to  Shirley  more 
than  three  -  quarters  of  a  century,  of  constant  and 
voluminous  practice  in  lyric,  with  the  modern  English 
pronunciation  and  quantity-valuation  more  or  less  settled.1 
The  greatest  triumph  of  the  time,  and  one  of  the  greatest 
triumphs  of  English  or  any  prosody  —  the  ineffably 
beautiful  "common  measure"  of  this  time — was  actually 
the  last  €7riyewr)/jia,  the  final  growth  and  flower  of  nearly 
four  hundred  years'  practice  of  the  fourteener,  continuous 
and  broken,  from  Robert  of  Gloucester  and  the  Judas 
poem  onwards.  The  octosyllabic  couplets,  either  full  or 
catalectic,  were  older  still,  and  trace  themselves  directly 
to  the  "  heap  "  of  Layamon  ;  while  the  "  long  measure  " 
is  a  variation  of  them  which  must  have  been  hit,  deliber- 
ately or  by  accident,  soon  after  they  themselves  emerged. 

1  I  am  aware  that  some  high  authorities  think  that  pronunciation  in 
Shakespeare's  time  differed  greatly  from  ours.  Save  in  a  few  well-known 
cases,  not  themselves  of  much  importance,  I  cannot  agree  with  them. 


vi  INTERCHAPTER  VI  351 

As  for  the  more  variegated  forms,  the  "  broken  and 
cuttit "  measures,  they  had  been  practised  during  the 
whole  major  Elizabethan  time,  till  it  would  have  been 
strange  indeed  if  such  perfection  as  practice  can  give  had 
not  been  reached.  But  there  is  something  more  than 
this.  There  is  in  lyric  at  once  a  constraint  and  an 
easement,  neither  of  which  exists,  to  the  same  extent,  in 
continuous  verse,  though  there  is  more  of  it  in  stanza 
narrative  than  in  couplet  or  "  blanks."  You  must  pay 
some  attention  to  your  form  ;  if  you  do  not  it  will  give 
you  constant  jogs  and  nips  of  reminder  which  only  the 
dullest  and  most  callous  can  neglect.  And,  for  the  most 
part,  the  shortness  of  the  lines,  the  frequent  recurrence  of 
the  rhymes,  and  other  things  of  the  same  kind,  while 
they  require  a  certain  effort,  confine  that  effort  within 
moderate  limits,  and  do  not  offer  the  tempting  but 
dangerous  expatiation  of  the  continuous  verse.  But  the 
instrument,  like  all  good  instruments,  can  be  ruined  by 
bad  playing,  and  nearly  as  much  so  by  simply  not  being 
played  upon  ;  and  we  shall  see  in  future  Books  how  this 
actually  came  about. 

With  the  stanza-forms  of  narrative  which  come  nearest 
to  lyric,  the  case  was  the  same  with  a  difference.  They 
had  actually  reached  perfection  (in  the  rhyme -royal  of 
Chaucer  and  of  Sackville  first,  in  the  Spenserian  novena 
afterwards)  much  earlier  than  lyric,  and  it  was  the  way 
of  the  world  that  they  should  die  off  first — that  they 
should  take  their  turn  of  the  application  of  the  law  that 
nothing  endures — that  the  one  fair,  good,  wise  thing 
shall  not  stay  in  the  hand  that  grasps  it — nay,  that  the 
hands  shall  slacken  their  grasp  of  the  thing. 

Besides,  your  epic  or  your  romance  is,  after  all,  another 
guess  matter  from  your  copy  of  verses  ;  and  it  is  one 
thing,  as  Sir  Francis  Kynaston  shows  us  with  his  lyric 
and  his  romance,  to  turn  out  a  perfect  song  of  three 
stanzas  and  another  to  produce  an  even  tolerably  perfect 
poem  of  five  or  six  hundred.  And  for  a  third  cause  of 
decay  we  must  remember  the  concomitant  growth,  in  the 
period,  of  blank  verse  and  of  the  couplet.  The  rose 


352        LATER  JACOBEAN  &  CAROLINE  POETRY      BOOK 

will  always  wither  ;  but  the  withering  of  hesterna  rosa  is 
made  more  conspicuous,  and  at  least  seems  to  be  actually 
hurried,  by  the  blooming  of  rosa  hodierna.  Once  more, 
it  may  be  rather  unphilosophical,  rather  question-begging, 
to  say  that  the  stanza  is  more  poetical  than  the  couplet 
or  the  blank,  and  that  therefore,  as  generations  get  more 
prosaic,  they  will  like  the  stanza  less,  and  the  couplet 
or  the  blank  more.  But  if  philosophy  is  divine,  un- 
philosophy  is  exceedingly  human. 

Undoubtedly  the  chief  and  central  prosodic  fact  of 
this  period  is  the  rise,  if  not  yet  the  thorough  establish- 
ment, of  the  couplet  itself.  We  have  traced  this  rise  with, 
it  is  to  be  hoped,  sufficient  care,  and  with  it  the  struggle 
of  competing  forms  which  accompanies  and  in  a  way 
constitutes  it.1  And  we  have  not  attempted  to  conceal 
the  fact  that  though  the  enjambed  couplet  may  be  much 
the  more  beautiful  at  its  best,  it  is  very  much  the  uglier 
at  its  worst,  and  is  specially  likely  to  be  bad.  In  fact,  it 
may  be  said  without  exaggeration,  that  it  is,  if  not  exactly 
a  spurious  form,  something  of  a  hybrid — that  its  graces 
are  the  graces,  not  so  much  of  the  couplet  itself,  as  of  the 
stanza,  or  of  blanks  with  rhyme  added.  There  is  something 
Bohemian,  something  even  contraband,  about  its  charm  ; 
and  it  is  scarcely  necessary  to  add  that  it  is  not  the  only 
thing  contraband  or  Bohemian  that  is  charming.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  graces  of  the  stopped  couplet  are  from  the 
first,  and  tend  to  be,  more  and  more,  graces  of  order  and 
rule.  It  is  not  necessarily  staid  or  stiff:  it  can  be  lively 
enough.  Nor  is  it  by  any  means  necessarily  flat  or  dull : 
it  can  assume  majesty  and  display  vigour  with  any  form 
of  verse  you  like.  But  it  lacks — especially  as  it  breeds 
itself  more  "  in-and-in  " — atmosphere,  suggestion,  aura.  It 
is,  though  very  far  from  the  most  elaborate,  the  most 
mechanical  and  metallic  form  that  prosody  has  ever 
known.  Now,  metal  has  plenty  of  resonance.  You  can 
make  large  brass  instruments  with  it,  and  frame  pianos 

1  I  think  it  impossible  to  lay  too  much  stress  on  the  way  in  which  the 
excesses  of  the  enjambed  couplet  and  the  broken-down  blank  verse  drove 
men  to  the  stopped  form. 


vi  INTERCHAPTER  VI  353 

with  it,  and  construct  all  sorts  of  musical  things,  down  to 
Jews'  harps,  with  it.  But  you  cannot,  they  say,  make  a 
fiddle  of  it  that  shall  be  good  for  anything,  though  you 
can  of  almost  all  the  trees  of  the  forest,  and  even  (so 
says  legend)  of  a  dead  woman's  bones. 

It  was  this  severer  and  more  prosaic  but  more 
genuine  form  to  which  the  taste  of  the  time  was  really 
directed,  though  for  a  season  the  actual  quantity  of 
couplet  production  tended  the  other  way.  This  last  fact 
was  probably  due,  first,  to  the  survival  of  a  taste  for  stanza 
forms;  secondly,  to  something  less  creditable — to  the  other 
fact  that  the  enjambed  couplet  looks  the  easier  of  the  two. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  and  as  further  practice  showed,  it  is 
just  the  other  way — at  least  if  you  try  not  merely  to  do, 
but  to  do  well.  It  is  excessively  difficult  to  keep  the 
enjambed  couplet  at  a  high  level  of  excellence :  only 
master  the  few  and  easy  tricks  of  its  rival,  and,  as  the 
satirist  says — 

You  or  any  man 
Can  reel  it  off  for  miles  together. 

They  did  not  know  that  yet ;  and  they  were  half 
enraptured  by  the  Wallerian  smoothness,  half  afraid  of  it 
as  of  something  new  and  uncanny.  But  the  stopped  couplet 
had  not  yet  had  its  enormous  luck  of  falling  into  the 
hands  of  a  craftsman  who,  while  he  developed  almost  all 
its  own  proper  qualities,  enriched  it  with  others,  not 
perhaps  more  of  its  essence  than  those  of  its  enjambed 
rival,  but  much  more  consonant  to  the  prevalent  tastes,  and 
much  less  liable  to  abuse.  And  so  in  this  Book  we  leave 
it  half  way  :  entering,  but  not  entered  upon,  its  kingdom. 

In  this  last  point  the  fortunes  of  blank  verse,  as  we  see 
them  from  the  advantage-ground  of  1660,  or  thereabouts, 
are  curiously  similar ;  for  Milton  had  to  some  extent 
"  come,"  and  was  coming  to  a  much  greater.  But  in  all 
others  they  are  as  curiously  different  Blank  verse  is,  unlike 
the  stanza  (lyrical  or  narrative)  and  the  couplet,  a  new- 
comer. It  has  even  "  come  in  ten  thousand  strong " 
and  carried  everything  before  it,  for  a  time  at  least,  on  the 
stage,  displaying,  in  the  hands  of  Shakespeare,  powers 

VOL.  II  2  A 


354        LATER  JACOBEAN  fr  CAROLINE  POETRY      BOOK 

which  no  metre  has  ever  excelled,  and  in  those  of  not  a 
few  others,  powers  which  few  metres  have  ever  equalled. 
But  it  has  gone  almost  as  rapidly  as  it  came,  in  one  if  not 
in  all  senses  of  going.  The  relaxation — the  actual  bone- 
dissolution — which  came  upon  one  form  only  of  the 
couplet  has  come  upon  it  universally,  and  in  a  far  more 
malignant  form.  It  will  be  said  of  it  in  a  year  or  two, 
and  said  with  a  certain  colour  of  truth,  that  it  is  "  too  mean 
for  a  copy  of  verses  "  ;  both  against  it  and  in  its  favour, 
that  it  is  so  like  prose  as  to  be  unobjectionable  as  a 
medium  of  conversation  on  the  stage.  And  this  is 
scarcely  forty  years  after 

We  are  such  stuff 

As  dreams  are  made  of,  and  our  little  life 

Is  rounded  with  a  sleep, 

had  been  first  printed,  perhaps  scarcely  fifty  after  it  had  been 
first  written.  What  is  still  more  singular,  the  dramatic 
perfection,  thus  lost,  has  never  been  exactly  recovered  since. 
But — though  the  loss  is  not  quite  yet,  Comus  being  at 
any  rate  dramatic  in  form — it  is  about  to  be  freshly  started 
as  a  non-dramatic  medium  in  a  form  almost  as  glorious  as 
Shakespeare's  own,  and  destined  to  constant  revival,  if  not 
positive  progress,  to  the  present  day. 

It  cannot  be  too  often  repeated  that,  in  prosody  as  in 
poetry  generally,  Milton,  though  he  is  in  his  time,  is  not  of 
it.  But  the  statement  may  be  taken  too  absolutely  ;  and 
perhaps  it  is  sometimes  made  under  something  of  the  same 
misapprehension.  In  his  early  work  he  was  of  his  time 
in  his  lyrical  sweetness  and  perfection,  as  well  as  in  his 
special  fondness  for,  and  proficiency  in,  the  mixed  iambic- 
trochaic  octosyllable-heptasyllable.  He  was  of  it  in  his 
refusal  of  stanza  for  his  great  later  poems.  But  he  was 
conspicuously  not  of  it — not  merely  in  his  rejection  of 
the  couplet,  not  merely  in  his  complete  freedom  from  its 
tendency  to  degrade  and  maltreat  blank  verse,  but  in  his 
exaltation  of  that  medium  to  the  place  and  function 
described  at  the  end  of  the  last  paragraph. 

The  natural  consequence  was  that  his  influence,  though 
immense,  was  not  immediate.  There  are  stealers  from 


vi  INTERCHAPTER  VI  355 

Milton — that  odd  person  Baron,  for  instance — quite  early, 
but  there  are  no  real  imitators  of  him,  early  or  late,  in  his 
own  life.  Dryden's  admiration,  great  and  genuine  as  it 
certainly  was,  did  not  lie  in  the  least  in  the  direction  of 
form.  He  "  tags  "  Milton's  blanks  while  he  is  in  love  with 
rhyme  for  stage  purposes  ;  and  when  he  has  taken  a  new 
mistress,  his  own  kind  of  blank  verse,  fine  as  it  is  in  All 
for  Love  and  the  rest,  is  not  Miltonic  at  all.  Nowhere 
does  Milton,  for  his  own  lifetime,  and  for  long  afterwards, 
dwell  so  much  apart  as  in  the  sphere  of  prosody  :  it  is  only 
by  a  sort  of  cosmic  alteration  that  the  star  of  his  soul 
begins  to  shed  its  influence  here. 

On  the  other  hand,  looked  at  from  a  greater  altitude 
and  with  wider  range,  he  is  one  of  the  very  greatest  facts 
of  English  prosodic  history  ;  and  as  such  we  have  given 
him  room  accorded  to  hardly  any  one  else.  Separated  as 
he  was  from  all  the  immediate  or  nearly  immediate 
prosodic  interests  and  symptoms  of  his  own  time,  he 
supplies  infallibly,  though  no  doubt  undesignedly,  all  or 
almost  all  that  is  necessary  to  correct  the  faults  of  that 
time,  to  confirm,  while  extending  and  vitalising,  its  merits. 
Moreover,  he  does  something  for  English  prosody  at  large 
which  had  to  be  done  at  some  time,  though  not  perhaps 
necessarily  in  this.  His  parergon  in  the  sonnet,  interesting 
and  important  as  it  is,  still  is  a  parergon.  His  blank- 
verse  paragraph,  and  his  audacious  and  victorious  attempt 
to  combine  blanks  and  rhymed  verse  with  paragraphic 
effect  in  Lycidas,  lay  down  indestructible  models  and 
patterns  of  English  vexsfc-rhytkm,  as  distinguished  from 
the  narrower  and  more  strait-laced  forms  of  English  metre 
which  lyric  and  stanza  had  already  made  safe,  and  as 
against  the  ungirt  and  unstayed  lubricity  of  the  unstopped 
couplet,  the  brisk  insufficiency  and  commonness  of  the 
stopped.  That  by  Pause,  Equivalence,  and  Substitution — 
these  three — you  can  secure  perfect  English  poetic  form  ; 
that,  to  secure  it  in  perfection,  whether  you  add  rhyme  or 
not,  you  must  attend  to  these, — that  is  the  doctrine  and 
the  secret  of  Milton.  It  was  long  before  it  was  understood 
— it  is  not  universally  understood  or  recognised  even  now. 


356     LATER  JACOBEAN  &*  CAROLINE  POETEY    BOOK  vi 

But  it  was  always  there  ;  and  as  enjoyment  and  admiration 
of  the  results  spread  and  abode,  there  was  ever  the  greater 
chance  of  the  principle  being  discovered,  the  greater 
certainty  of  its  being  put  into  perhaps  unconscious 
operation  by  imitation. 

And  so  Milton  in  a  sense  completed,  though  of  course  he 
did  not  in  the  least  arrest,  the  work  which  had  been  begun 
by  Chaucer  long  before,  which  had  been  resumed  by  Spenser 
and  carried  on  by  Shakespeare,  and  which  had  fallen  into 
his  hands  almost  directly  from  Shakespeare's  own.  In  this 
lease  of  the  three  lives  English  poetry  and  English  prosody 
had  been  developed  in  a  fashion  still  wonderful  in  our  eyes, 
but  certain,  and  fully  evidenced  by  the  results  which  we 
have  been  analysing  from  our  own  point  of  view.  They 
were  now  to  contract  operations  and  reverse  principle  in 
the  odd  way  in  which,  throughout  literary  as  throughout 
political  history,  people  (and  the  English  people  very 
particularly)  have  chosen  to  relinquish  the  fruits  of  victory, 
and  run  counter  to  their  own  previous  practice  and 
theories.  But  there  was  something  to  be  attempted 
and  done  still,  though  on  a  smaller  and  less  striking  scale  ; 
and  with  this  we  shall  be  concerned  in  the  rest  of  the 
volume. 


BOOK  VII 

THE    AGE    OF    DRYDEN 


357 


CHAPTER    I 

DRYDEN 

Variety  of  Dryden's  metres — His  general  prosodic  standpoint — His 
practice  —  The  Hastings  elegy  —  The  Heroic  Stanzas — 
Astrcea  Redux  and  its  group — Annus  Mirabilis — The  couplet 
in  the  Heroic  plays — Its  changes — And  conversion  to  blank — 
Dryden's  blank  verse — His  lyrics — Other  songs — The  Odes — 
The  Hymns,  etc. — The  couplet  in  the  Translations  —  In  the 
later  poems  generally — The  Prologues,  etc. — The  Satires — The 
didactic  and  narrative  pieces  —  Triplets  and  Alexandrines  — 
Note  on  Alexandrines  in  continuous  verse. 

AMONG  the  numerous,  and  nearly  always  significant,  Variety  of 
differences  between  Dryden  and  the  poet  who  continued 
(and  in  one  sense  finished)  his  work,  there  is  hardly  any 
more  striking,  though  there  are  several  which  have  struck 
more,  than  the  fact  that  while  Pope  is  practically  homo 
unius  metri,  Dryden  is  remarkably  polymetric.  To  some 
slight  extent,  indeed,  the  fact  that  there  is  hardly  anything 
of  his  more  widely  known  than  the  Ode  on  St.  Cecilia's 
Day  has  kept  in  mind  the  other  fact,  that  he  was  not  a 
mere  couplet-monger.  But  the  singular  fancy  which  has 
made  some  editors  of  the  Poems,  even  while  admitting 
Prologues  and  Epilogues  which  are  almost  purely  dramatic, 
keep  out  the  Songs  in  the  very  same  plays  which  are 
not  dramatic  at  all,1  has  obscured  the  full  truth  from 
the  general  reader.  That  full  truth  is  that,  here  as  else- 
where, Dryden  was  far  more  above,  and  less  of,  his  age 
than  Pope.  In  the  first  place  (and  here  Pope  is  not  to 
blame  for  not  sharing  his  advantage),  he  was  nearly  as 

1  They  are  in  the  "  Aldine  "  edition,  but  not  in  the  "  Globe." 
359 


360  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

much  of  the  past  age  as  of  that  succeeding  the  Restoration, 
having  spent  almost  half  his  life  in  the  former.  But,  in 
the  second,  he  had  what  was  all  his  own,  a  restless  and 
catholic  spirit  of  exploration  and  appreciation  which  made 
it  impossible  for  him  to  stay  in  one  groove.  The  incon- 
sistency with  which  he  has  been  reproached  by  short- 
sighted persons  in  his  criticism  is  really,  and  in  its  results 
invaluably,  one  side  of  this  Ulyssean  restlessness ;  his 
metrical  proceedings  are  another,  and  for  us  here  a  most 
interesting  one. 
His  general  According  to  a  remarkable  passage l  of  the  Dedication 

standpoint  °^  t'ie  ^ne^y  &  ls  onty  tne  envy  of  Fate  which  has 
prevented  us  from  having  Dryden's  theory  as  well  as  his 
practice  to  deal  with.  But  from  the  remarks  which 
precede  it,  and  which  deal  with  what  he  strangely  calls 
"  caesura  "  (i.e.  "  elision  "),2  there  is  some  chance  that  Fate 
here,  as  so  often,  has  been  cruel  only  to  be  kind.  There 
is,  indeed,  some  matter  in  his  remarkable  statement  that 
the  French  and  Italians  know  nothing  of  feet,  of  which 
a  less  transparent  and  Golden- Age -like  equity  than 
that  which  rules  in  this  book  might  lay  hold,  and  claim 
Dryden  for  a  convert.  I  shall  not  do  this  ;  though  I 
shall  be  able  to  show  that  he  was  with  us  in  spirit.  Nor 
shall  I  deny  that  his  Prosodia  might,  as  do  so  many  of 
his  criticisms,  show  an  odd  mingling  of  preceptive  in- 
adequacy and  impressionist  correctness.  But  I  fancy  that 
he  had  the  "  sweetness-of-Mr. -Waller  "  delusion  too  strong 
upon  him  to  have  done  more  than  expound,  magisterially, 
the  narrower  system.  Yet  I  may  invite  special  attention 
to  the  words  "  no  vowel  can  be  cut  off  before  another 
when  we  cannot  sink  the  pronunciation  of  it,"  because  this 
clearly  bars  that  singular  system  of  "  elision  and  no  elision  " 
— of  a  metrical  scansion  which  is  independent  of  and 

1  This  should  be  returned  to  in  the  "Prosodists"  chapter  of  this  Book, 
but  had  better  be  given  here  as  well : — "  I  have  long  had  by  me  the  materials 
of  an  English  Prosodia,  containing  all  the  mechanical  rules  of  versification, 
wherein  I  have  treated,  with  some  exactness,  of  the  feet,  the  quantities,  and 
the  pauses." 

2  "  There  is  not,  to  the  best  of  my  remembrance,  one  vowel  gaping  on 
another  for  want  of  a  casura,  in  this  whole  poem." 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  361 

contrary  to  rhythmical  pronunciation — with  which  we 
have  had  to  deal  in  Milton's  case.  Dryden  could  never 
have  reached  the  wooden  precision  of  Bysshe.  But  I 
should  imagine  that  Bysshe  does  not  do  much  more  than 
lignify  the  system  which  in  Dryden's  hands  would  have 
had  flesh  and  life,  though  not  all  the  life  and  the  flesh  that 
it  might  have  had.  But,  for  the  present,  to  his  practice. 

His  Juvenilia  are  well-known  to  be  few  in  number  and  His  practice. 
not  very  remarkable  in  quality.  The  extravagant  meta-  ele^  a 
physicalities  of  the  Hastings  elegy  (1649)  were  not  incon- 
sistent with  future  development ;  indeed,  and  from  our 
special  point  of  view,  they  hardly  present  anything  that 
is  noteworthy  to  any  one  who  has  read  much  of  the  poetry 
of  the  immediate  period.  It  is,  however,  noticeable  that 
though  this  was  the  very  flourishing  time  of  the  enjambed 
couplet  of  Pharonnida^  this  boy  of  seventeen  prefers  the 
closed  form,  and  achieves  something  distantly  like  the 
clench  and  stroke  of  his  own  future  in  such  single  lines  as 

To  bring  a  winding  for  a  wedding  sheet, 
and  even  in  distichs  like 

Graces  and  virtues,  languages  and  arts, 
Beauty  and  learning,  filled  up  all  the  parts. 

He  was  no  doubt  not  superior  to  the  apostrophation  of 
his  time  ;  and  would,  for  instance,  have  scanned,  if  he  did 
not  actually  write,  1-35  — 

Were  fixed  and  conglobate  in  his  soul  and  then, 

"  in  's  soul,"  unconscious  or  afraid  of  the  far  superior 
rhythm  of"  con  globate  in  ."  Nor  should  I  lay  much  stress 
on  "  filth(i)ness "  in  1.  54  and  "cab(i)net"  in  1.  64; 
while  "  to  hang  "  in  1.  84  was  probably  "  t'  hang."  2  The 

1  Part  of  which  was  written  six  or  seven  years  before,  while  the  whole  of 
it  was  published  ten  years  after  Dryden  wrote. 

2  Perhaps  these  three  lines  should  be  given  if  only  to  show  how  fine  the 
second  is  {properly  scanned) — 

The  very  filjthiness  of  |  Pandora's  box, 
The  cabi|net  of  a  richer  soul  within, 
Or  to  hang  |  an  antiquary's  room  withal. 


362 


THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN 


BOOK  VII 


The  Heroic 

Stanzas. 


apostrophation  mania  stuck  at  no  cacophony  in  these 
days.  But,  in  fact,  both  this  piece  and  the  Hoddesdon 
lines  next  year,  where,  in  the  last  places  of  the  i6th  line — 

And  look  the  Sun  of  Righteousness  in  the  face, 

we  must  take  it  as  "i'  th'  face,"  are  things  rather  not  to 
be  missed  than  to  be  dwelt  upon — they  tell  us  nothing 
real.  It  is  with  the  Heroic  Stanzas  of  1658-59  on 
Cromwell's  death,  written  when  Dryden  was  in  his  twenty- 
eighth  year,  that  his  poetic  career  begins. 

In  these  stanzas  there  is  still  something  of  what 
hasty  judges  call  that  "  unoriginal "  character  which  is  so 
noticeable  in  Dryden — as  it  is  also  in  Chaucer,  Shakespeare, 
and  other  persons  of  that  class.  He  accepts  a  fashionable 
form  of  the  moment — the  decasyllabic  quatrain — which, 
in  the  decadence  and  deliquescence  of  the  enjambed 
couplet,  the  immaturity  of  the  stopped  one,  and  the 
popular  weariness  of  the  more  elaborate  stanzas,  Davenant 
had  tried  in  Gondibert,  that  heroic  poem  which,  according 
to  the  principles  of  its  Preface  and  the  opinion  of  Mr. 
Hobbes,  was  going  to  revolutionise  English  poetry.  The 
supposed  advantages  of  this  quatrain  are  theoretically 
evident  It  gives  more  room  than  the  couplet ;  it  does  not 
invite  to  prolixity,  or  break  up  the  narrative,  to  the  same 
extent  as  the  longer  stanzas  may  seem  likely  to  do ;  and 
at  the  same  time  its  form  tightens  up,  and  applies  a 
styptic  to,  the  flowing  looseness  which  at  this  time  was  a 
special  danger.  Practically,  these  advantages  are  over- 
balanced, as  even  Annus  Mirabilis  was  to  show  finally, 
and  as  Gondibert  had  already  shown,  by  a  coincident 
combination  of  the  ^advantages  both  of  couplet  and 
stanza,  and  an  almost  unavoidable  stiffness.  You  cannot 
vary  your  stops  as  in  blank  verse  or  the  Spenserian, 
there  is  not  room  enough  :  and  the  recurrent  divisions 
necessitated  by  the  stanza  lack  at  once  the  conciseness 
and  continuity  of  the  couplet,  the  variety  and  amplitude 
of  the  rhyme-royal,  octave,  or  Spenserian  itself.  The 
Heroic  Stanzas  naturally  show  their  disadvantages  more 
than  the  Annus,  though  not  more  than  their  original  in 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  363 

Davenant.  But  there  is  already  a  new  "  mighty  line,"  less 
magnificent  than  Marlowe's,  but  hardly  less  vigorous,  and 
much  more  manageable.  This  appears  in  the  very 
opening,  but  it  is  specially  noticeable  in  stanzas  I3-I61 
and  elsewhere.  Only,  it  may  be  observed  that  pauses  of 
importance  literally  occur  nowhere  except  in  the  ist  and 
the  58th  line,  with  a  result  in  stately  monotony,  which  is 
more  interesting  than  felicitous. 

Considering  the  return  to  the  quatrain  in  the  Annus,  Astraa 
it  is  probable  that  it  was  mainly  a  feeling  that  Usurper and  lts  group 
and  King  should  not  be  celebrated  on  the  same  instru- 
ment which  made  Dryden,  only  a  year  or  two  later  than 
the  Cromwell  period,  revert  to  the  couplet  as  the  vehicle 
of  his  three  poems  on  the  Restoration,  Astrcea  Redux,  the 
Coronation  poem,  and  the  lines  to  Clarendon.  The 
difference  is  extraordinary.  That  the  metre  of  these 
things  should  excel  the  mere  Juvenilia  is  nothing ;  the 
point  is  that  they  far  excel  all  couplet  verse  of  their 
kind  by  Mr.  Waller  or  by  anybody  else,  in  force,  and 
strength,  and  timbre^  if  not  yet  in  deftness  and  agility. 
There  is  a  sledge-hammer  stroke  about  the  verse  of 


XIII 


Swift  and  resistless  through  the  land  he  past, 

Like  that  bold  Greek,  who  did  the  East  subdue  ; 

And  made  to  battles  such  heroic  haste, 
As  if  on  wings  of  victory  he  flew. 


He  fought,  secure  of  fortune  as  of  fame, 

Till  by  new  maps  the  island  might  be  shown, 

Of  conquests,  which  he  strewed  where'er  he  came, 
Thick  as  the  galaxy  with  stars  is  sown. 


His  palms,  though  under  weights  they  did  not  stand, 
Still  thrived  ;  no  winter  could  his  laurels  fade  : 

Heaven,  in  his  portrait,  shewed  a  workman's  hand, 
And  drew  it  perfect,  yet  without  a  shade. 

XVI 

Peace  was  the  prize  of  all  his  toil  and  care, 

Which  war  had  banished,  and  did  now  restore  : 

Bolognia's  walls  thus  mounted  in  the  air, 
To  seat  themselves  more  surely  than  before. 


364  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

Astrcea  Redux^  for  which,  save  in  casual  lines,  I  do  not 
know  where  to  look  before  it :  and  this  giant's  pulse  is 
kept  throughout.  There  is  interest  in  the  pause  (or  its 
absence),  and  interest  in  the  rhyme  ;  but  the  greatest 
prosodic  interest  of  all  is  in  this  redoubtable  march  of 
metre,  which  suggests,  not  so  much  Gray's  (borrowed)  car 
and  two  horses  as  the  image  of  a  warrior  in  complete 
steel,  riding  slowly  through  the  press  and  dealing  mace — 
rather  than  sword — strokes  as  he  goes.  There  is  also  one 
very  curious  and  interesting  device2  which  is  employed 
throughout,  and  which  consists  of  "  powdering "  (as  we 
may  call  it)  the  verse  with  repetitions  of  a  particular 

1  Now  with  a  general  peace  the  world  was  blest, 
While  ours,  a  world  divided  from  the  rest, 

A  dreadful  quiet  felt,  and  worser  far 

Than  arms,  a  sullen  interval  of  war. 

Thus  when  black  clouds  draw  down  the  lab'ring  skies, 

Ere  yet  abroad  the  winged  thunder  flies, 

An  horrid  stillness  first  invades  the  ear, 

And  in  that  silence  we  the  tempest  fear. 

The  ambitious  Swede,  like  restless  billows  tost, 

On  this  hand  gaining  what  on  that  he  lost, 

Though  in  his  life  he  blood  and  ruin  breathed, 

To  his  now  guideless  kingdom  peace  bequeathed  ; 

And  heaven  that  seemed  regardless  of  our  fate, 

For  France  and  Spain  did  miracles  create  ; 

Such  mortal  quarrels  to  compose  in  peace, 

As  nature  bred,  and  interest  did  increase. 

2  Our  setting  sun,  from  his  declining  seat, 
Shot  beams  of  kindness  on  you,  not  of  heat ; 
And,  when  his  love  was  bounded  in  a  few 
That  were  unhappy,  that  they  might  be  true, 
Made  you  the  favourite  of  his  last  sad  times, 
That  is,  a  sufferer  in  his  subjects'  crimes. 
Thus,  those  first  favours  you  received,  were  sent, 
Like  heaven's  rewards,  in  earthly  punishment : 
Yet  fortune,  conscious  of  your  destiny, 

E'en  then  took  care  to  lay  you  softly  by, 

And  wrapped  your  fate  among  her  precious  things, 

Kept  fresh  to  be  unfolded  with  your  king's. 

Shown  all  at  once,  you  dazzled  so  our  eyes, 

As  new-born  Pallas  did  the  gods  surprise, 

When,  springing  forth  from  Jove's  new-closing  wound, 

She  struck  the  warlike  spear  into  the  ground  ; 

Which  sprouting  leaves  did  suddenly  inclose, 

And  peaceful  olives  shaded  as  they  rose. 

Compare  with  this  the  opening  of  Verses  to  the  Duchess,  where  the  "you  " 
stop  is  even  more  skilfully  played  on. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  365 

word,  sure  to  be  pronounced  with  more  or  less  emphasis, 
and  so  providing,  as  well  as  the  regular  setting  of  the 
rhyme,*  a  peculiar  accompaniment  of  sound  that  almost 
produces  the  stanza  effect,  and  in  a  manner  makes  up 
for  the  absence  of  pause-variety. 

It  would  be  easy,  but  probably  idle,  and  certainly  in-  Annus 
conclusive,  to  guess  why  he  reverted  to  the  quatrain  in 
Annus  Mirabilis.  Probably,  being  as  yet  inexperienced 
in  the  varied  powers  of  the  couplet,  and  particularly 
struck  at  the  moment  (as  we  know  from  the  Essay  of 
Dramatic  Poesy)  with  its  dramatic  capabilities,  he  thought 
that,  in  a  narrative  of  stirring  but  individual  scenes  and 
accidents,  the  stanza  would  be  better  ;  while  he  was  still 
not  a  little  under  the  influence  of  Davenant.  At  any 
rate,  he  did  use  it,  and  showed  (as  he  probably  convinced 
himself)  both  its  full  capabilities  and  its  almost  in- 
evitable limitations.  It  has  gained,  in  his  hands,  a  great 
deal  of  vigour,  variety,  and  flexibility ;  while  it  has 
certainly  lost  no  weight  since  he  used  it  seven  or  eight 
years  earlier.  And  his  practice  in  couplet  has  clenched 
his  epigrammatic  power  in  single  lines.  The  way  in 
which  he  vignettes  most  of  his  numerous  descriptions 
always  makes  me  think  of  an  old  chart  of  the  History 
of  England  which  used  to  exist  in  my  childhood,  with 
framed  cuts,  like  book-plates,  of  battles,  and  beheadings 
of  kings  and  kesars,  arranged  round  its  margin.  The 
Bergen  blunder,  the  great  three-days  battle,  the  dock- 
yard scenes  themselves,  the  second  battle,  the  burning 
of  "  the  Fly "  (as  Ulie  used  to  be  called),  and  above  all 
the  fire,  are  admirably  done  in  a  sort  of  convention  of 
their  own  ;  and  the  argumentative  and  other  connecting 
passages  already  confess  Dryden's  almost  unequalled 
skill  in  that  semi-poetic  kind  of  verse.  The  diction  is 

1  Dryden's  rhymes  almost  deserve  a  special  appendix  or  note.  Here, 
for  instance,  A.  R.  106,  147,  we  have  "chronicles"  rhymed  (as  is  not  un- 
common with  him  later)  " chromc/ees,"  and  "hour"  to  "  travellour,"  which 
latter  word  elsewhere  takes  "stars"  and  "wars"  for  companions.  I  believe 
that  we  may  generalise  these  latter  rhymes  thus:  "Any  combination  of 
letters  may,  in  rhyme,  take  any  sound  which  it  sometimes  has,  though  in 
another  word." 


366  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

often  extremely  felicitous,  and  in  some  parts,  especially 
the  famous  "  stanza  of  the  heads," l  the  stanza  itself 
accompanies  the  meaning  with  a  wonderfully  suitable 
and  original  music.  But,  on  the  whole,  the  effect  is  still 
stiff  and  monotonous.  The  "  rocking-horse  "  undulation 
of  the  quatrain — with  its  equal  lines,  very  seldom  strongly 
stopped  internally,  most  frequently  end-stopped  in  them- 
selves, and  in  almost  every  case  with  full  stop  at  the 
end  of  each  stanza — would  send  one  to  sleep  if  it  were 
anybody  but  Dryden  who  is  writing ;  and  comes  more 
nearly  than  it  should  to  doing  this,  as  it  is. 

For  some  dozen  years  after  the  appearance  of  the 
Annus,  Dryden  put  forth  nothing  of  importance,  in  poetry 
strictly  so  called.  But  his  poetical,  and  especially  his 
prosodic  practice  was  continued  and  immensely  extended 
during  the  whole  of  this  long  time.  Indeed,  it  may  be 
justly  taken  as  his  final  stage  of  exercise.  When  we 
leave  him  with  the  Annus,  his  verse,  though  of  the  most 
eminent  promise  and  even  accomplishment,  has  not 
shaken  itself  quite  free  :  it  is  good  but  laboured,  effective 

1  The  last  of  four  which  will  give  a  good  specimen  passage  : — 

ccxx 
So  scapes  the  insulting  Fire  his  narrow  jail, 

And  makes  small  outlets  into  open  air ; 
There  the  fierce  winds  his  tender  force  assail, 

And  beat  him  downward  to  his  first  repair. 

CCXXI 
The  winds,  like  crafty  courtesans,  withheld 

His  flames  from  burning,  but  to  blow  them  more  ; 
And,  every  fresh  attempt,  he  is  repelled 

With  faint  denials,  weaker  than  before. 

CCXXII 
And  now,  no  longer  letted  of  his  prey,  * 

He  leaps  up  at  it  with  enraged  desire  ; 
O'erlooks  the  neighbours  with  a  wide  survey, 

And  nods  at  every  house  his  threat'ning  fire. 

CCXXII  I 
The  ghosts  of  traitors  from  the  bridge  descend, 

With  bold  fanatic  spectres  to  rejoice  ; 
About  the  fire  into  a  dance  they  bend, 

And  sing  their  Sabbath  notes  with  feeble  voice. 

Scott  calls  the  last  "this  most  beautiful  stanza." 


CHAP,  i  DRY  DEN  367 

but  unfinished.  When  we  meet  it  again  in  Absalom  and 
Ackitophel,  the  freedom  has  been  finally  obtained,  the 
finish  definitely  put  on. 

As  far  as  the  decasyllabic,  his  great  staple,  was  con- 
cerned, this  mastery  had  been  brought  about  in  a  double 
line  of  practice.  At  the  very  moment  when  he  was 
writing  the  narrative  Annus  in  quatrains,  he  was,  as  has 
been  pointed  out,  championing  the  couplet  for  dramatic 
purposes  in  the  Essay.  As  before,  what  notice  we  must  give 
to  his  arguments,  good  or  bad,  will  come  best  elsewhere  ; 
it  is  his  practice  with  which  we  are  here  concerned. 

This  practice  was  copious  enough  in  the  "  Heroic  "  The  couplet 
plays  ;  and  it  soon  conferred  upon  him  complete  facility  lr]athse  Herolc 
of  a  certain  kind.  It  could  not  take  a  Dryden  long  to 
learn  the  "rhyming  and  rattling"  which  he  labelled 
contemptuously  later.  And  a  Dryden  could  not  learn 
this  without  learning  a  great  deal  else  with  it,  and  un- 
learning some  things.  The  Heroic  play  had  a  convention 
of  style  and  sentiment,  as  well  as  a  convention  of  metre. 
The  two  had  no  necessary  connection,  but  they  were,  in 
the  usual  course  of  human  things,  certain  to  react  on 
each  other.  The  extravagant  sentiment  and  passion,  the 
trick  of  sword-and-buckler  interchange  of  short  speeches, 
and  the  declamatory  bombast  which  was  fashionable, 
found  in  the  couplet  a  very  ready  instrument.  The 
worst  of  it  was  that  this  instrument  was  too  ready,  and 
carried  the  effects  required  of  it  over  the  line  into 
burlesque.  This  defect — naturally  enough  caught  up 
and  reflected  by  the  parodists  of  the  Rehearsal,  etc. — is 
patent  and  flagrant  in  the  earlier  plays  up  to  the  partly 
beautiful  and  partly  absurd  Tyrannic  Love :  and  Dryden 
has  not  entirely  cured  it  in  the  triumph  of  the  style,  that 
unique  tour  de  force  the  Conquest  of  Granada.  But  by  its  changes. 
this  time,  and  in  many  instances  earlier,  he  has  contrived 
to  get  out  of  it,  or  into  it,  an  effective  rhetorical  form 
constantly,  and  occasionally  a  really  great  poetic  vehicle. 
In  particular,  he  has  discovered  and  applied,  as  nobody 
had  applied  before,  the  "  driving "  power  of  the  couplet 
— that  faculty  of,  as  it  were,  ramming  things  home, 


368  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

which  is  as  much  its  special  virtue  as  the  plangency  of 
rhyme -royal,  the  descriptive  and  pictorial  capacity  of 
the  Spenserian,  the  universal  adaptableness  of  blank 
verse,  or  the  half  melancholy  meditation  of  the  enclosed 
In  Memoriam  quatrain.  This  driving  power  is,  of  course, 
sovereign  for  the  pointes,  the  sententtae,  the  yv&fjuai,  which 
are  at  once  the  solace  and  the  sin  of  the  "  heroic  "  style ; 
and  it  is  scarcely  less  useful  in  the  passages  of  sentiment 
or  of  rodomontade,  while  it  makes  the  wit  and  gallantry 
combats,  if  more  dangerously  near  to  the  comic,  more 
comfortably  free  from  the  wearisome,  than  blank-verse 
stichomythia. 

In  the  very  process  of  growing  weary  of  his  long- 
loved  mistress,  "  rhyme,"  Dryden  experimented  in  Aureng- 
zebe  with  a  slightly  different  form  of  couplet  itself — a 
form  more  enjambed,  less  wedded  to  the  sharp  hammer- 
stroke  at  the  end  of  each  distich,  approaching  nearer  to 
the  blank-verse  period  or  paragraph,  and  so  inevitably 
tending  towards  the  adoption  of  that  period  or  paragraph 
itself.  This  produced  among  other  things  the  famous 
"  criticism  of  life,"  which  has  ranked  as  the  most  purple 
passage  of  his  plays,  and  which  any  poet  might  be  proud 
to  have  written.  But  the  form  of  this,  finer  at  the  best, 
is  flatter  when  not  at  its  best,  and  more  insidiously 
invokes  the  question,  "  Why  rhyme  at  all  ?  "  1 

1  It,  with  an  earlier  sample  of  the  other  style,  will  probably  suffice  for 
specimens.  We  need  no  "awful"  (or  rather  ludicrous)  "examples";  for 
though  the  metre  usually  emphasises  the  absurdity  it  does  not  create  it. 

Fair  though  you  are 

As  summer  mornings,  and  your  eyes  more  bright 
Than  stars  that  twinkle  in  a  winter's  night ; 
Though  you  have  eloquence  to  warm  and  move 
Cold  age  and  praying  hermits  into  love ; 
Though  Almahide  with  scorn  rewards  my  care, — 
Yet,  than  to  change,  'tis  nobler  to  despair. 
My  love's  my  soul ;  and  that  from  fate  is  free  ; 
'Tis  that  unchanged  and  deathless  part  of  me. 

C.  ofG.  II.,  III.  iii. 

When  I  consider  life,  'tis  all  a  cheat. 
Yet,  fooled  with  hope,  men  favour  the  deceit ; 
Trust  on,  and  think  to-morrow  will  repay  : 
To-morrow's  falser  than  the  former  day, 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  369 

He  heard  that  question,  and  answered  it  by  taking  to  And  conver- 
blank  verse  itself ;  and  a  very  interesting  study  his  blank  Slon  to  blank' 
verse  is,  both  intrinsically  as  a  contrast  to  the  dramatic 
blank  verse  of  "  the  last  age,"  and  in  connection  with  the 
extremely  difficult  problem  to  determine  why,  when  we  have 
produced  in  the  last  two  centuries  narrative  blank  verse 
not  unworthy  of  its  ancestor  Milton,  we  have  never 
produced  dramatic  blank  verse  in  the  very  least  degree 
worthy  of  its  ancestor  Shakespeare.  For  a  hundred  years 
after  Dryden  there  is  no  dramatic  blank  verse  that  can 
touch  Dryden's  from  any  point  of  view,  whether  we  look 
at  it  as  verse  to  be  spoken  or  as  verse  to  be  read.  For 
a  hundred  years  more  till  the  present  day  we  have  not 
unfrequently  had  dramatic  blank  verse  which  has  been 
perhaps  what  we  are  pleased  to  call  more  "  poetic  "  than 
his  ;  but  then,  at  least  in  the  humble  judgment  of  the 
present  writer,  it  has  never  been  anything  like  so 
dramatic. 

The  stock  test  passage  is,  of  course,  the  description  of 
Cleopatra  on  the  Cydnus,  and  though  I  hope  that  I  have 
shown  myself  not  obliged  to  stick  to  stock  passages,  it 
appears  to  me  puerile  to  go  out  of  the  way  to  neglect 
them.  Few  nowadays  will  take  the  view  once  entertained 
by  great  admirers  of  both  poets,  that  Dryden  is  here 
Shakespeare's  equal  ;  none,  perhaps,  that  which  was 
certainly  once  entertained  by  people  not  small,  that  he 
is  Shakespeare's  superior.  We  are  not  quite  over  the 
border  between  poetry  and  rhetoric,  but  we  are  approach- 
ing it,  if  not  actually  in  the  debatable  land  between  them. 
The  march  is  more  perceptible  than  the  flight,  the  toga 
more  in  evidence  than  the  singing  robe  ;  and  yet  the 
piece  is  poetry,  and,  what  is  more,  good  poetry,  and,  what 

Lies  worse,  and  while  it  says  we  shall  be  blest 
With  some  new  joys,  cuts  off  what  we  possessed. 
Strange  cozenage  !  none  would  live  past  years  again, 
Yet  all  hope  pleasure  in  what  yet  remain  ; 
And,  from  the  dregs  of  life,  think  to  receive 
What  the  first  sprightly  running  could  not  give. 
I'm  tired  with  waiting  for  this  chemic  gold, 
Which  fools  us  young  and  beggars  us  when  old. 

Aurengzebe,  IV.  i. 

VOL.  II  2  B 


370  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

Dryden's  blank  is  still  more,  good  dramatic  poetry.1  Dryden's  blank 
verse  is,  indeed,  a  construction  of  quite  peculiar  quality, 
and  it  serves  as  a  fair  test  in  the  few  "  doubtful "  plays 
which  have  been  attributed  to  him,  as  well  as  sometimes 
in  those  where  he  collaborated  with  others.  In  its  most 
perfect  example,  All  for  Love,  which  has  just  been  sampled, 
the  poet  has  made  great  efforts  to  attain  the  Shakespearian 
fluidity.  He  has  come  nearest  to  it  in  the  passage  cited, 
in  the  interview  with  Cleopatra  on  the  return  from  Parthia, 
and  the  last  scene  before  Antony's  death.  He  has 
achieved  much  by  the  ordinary  means — by  the  variation 
of  the  pause,  and  the  provision  of  full  stops  in  the  interior 
of  the  line  ;  and  he  has  even  sometimes  come  near  to 
that  effect  which  we  compared  formerly  to  the  running  of 
quicksilver  through  a  tube  to  alter  its  balance.  But 
Dryden's  fluid  is  denser  and  less  "  quick "  than  Shake- 
speare's ;  or  (to  vary  the  metaphor)  he  takes  breath  more 
perceptibly,  and  at  more  frequent  intervals.  Lee  has  the 
advantage  of  him  in  this  respect,  though  Otway  has  not. 
The  truth  evidently  is  that  the  tendency  of  the  couplet  to 
emphasis  was  too  thoroughly  congenial  to  Dryden,  and 
had  been  developed  by  him  too  frequently  and  familiarly, 
not  to  impress  itself  likewise  upon  his  blanks.  Yet  they 
are,  after  his  very  first  beginnings,  seldom  or  never 
wooden,  and  not  often  merely  rhetorical.  In  still  later  plays, 
such  as  Don  Sebastian  and  Cleomenes,  they  provide  a  very 
stately  and  by  no  means  stiff  medium  of  dramatic  speech. 
It  must  not,  however,  be  supposed  that  Dryden  had 
never  tried  blank  verse  till  he  became  disgusted  with  the 
couplet.  On  the  contrary,  his  early  plays — some  of  them 

1  She  lay,  and  leant  her  cheek  upon  her  hand, 
And  cast  a  look  so  languishingly  sweet 
As  if,  secure  of  all  beholders'  hearts, 
Neglecting,  she  could  take  them  :  boys  like  Cupids 
Stood  fanning,  with  their  painted  wings,  the  winds 
That  played  about  her  face.     But  if  she  smiled, 
A  darting  glory  seemed  to  blaze  abroad, 
That  men's  desiring  eyes  were  never  wearied, 
But  hung  upon  the  object  :     To  soft  lutes 
The  silver  oars  kept  time  ;  and  while  they  played, 
The  hearing  gave  new  pleasure  to  the  sight, 
And  both  to  thought.  All  for  Lave,  III.  i. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  371 

written  before  the  fancy  or  fashion  for  rhyme  had  come 
in — contain  plenty  of  it,  and  in  some  it  disputed  the 
place  with  the  couplet  itself.  The  Wild  Gallant  is  in 
prose  ;  but  The  Rival  Ladies  exhibits  the  competition  of 
the  two  verse-vehicles.1  Dryden  was  too  much  of  a 
craftsman,  and  had  too  regular  an  ear,  ever  to  permit 
himself  the  worst  excesses  of  blank  verse  that  is  blank  of 
every  verse-characteristic  except  the  division  of  the  lines 
— of  the  hideous  mingle-mangle  of  which  we  should  have 
seen  enough.  His  model  is  evidently  that  of  Beaumont 
and  Fletcher  in  their  less  inspired  passages — a  good  many 
redundant  endings,  a  free  use  of  fragmentary  lines,  and  so 
forth.  But  it  is  noticeable  that  he  has  not  risen  to  the 
secret  of  the  verse-paragraph  ;  and  that  his  lines,  whether 
they  have  an  actual  stop  at  the  end  or  not,  are  mainly  of 
that  "  self-contained  "  kind  of  which  we  have  said  so  much. 
To  this  last  characteristic,  indeed,  he  always  more  or  less 
adhered — in  fact,  it  was  closely  connected  with  his 
mastery  of  the  closed  couplet.  But,  in  spite  of  it,  he 
managed  later  to  achieve  a  very  fair  paragraph.  We 
have  seen  that  Milton,  whose  paragraphs  are  hardly  sur- 
passable  in  their  way,  and  who  certainly  had  no  small 
influence  over  his  junior  and  admirer,  was  in  no  such 
very  dissimilar  case. 

But  besides  this  immense  and  double  exercise  in  the  His  lyrics. 
great  dramatic  and  epic  line,  Dryden  gave  himself,  in  the 
plays,  another,  of  which  we  have  no  examples  from  him 
before  them  and  only  a  few  outside  of  them,  while  the 
whole  division  is  perhaps  the  least  known  of  his  work. 
These  songs  are  invaluable  to  compare,  not  merely  with  that 
Second  Caroline  lyric  contemporary  with  them  which  (at 
least  in  the  masterpieces  of  Dorset,  Sedley,  and  Rochester) 
has  preserved  a  certain  vogue,  but  with  the  First  Caroline 

1  The  uncertainty  which  exists  as  to  his  part  in  The  Indian  Qtieen  makes 
it  difficult  to  draw  any  conclusions  from  that  play  except  as  to  the  lyrics, 
which  Sir  Robert  Howard,  alias  "  Crites,"  alias  "  Sir  Positive  At-all,"  simply 
could  not  have  written.  But  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  he  "  buckwashed  " 
the  body  of  the  play  a  good  deal ;  and  it  is  at  least  noteworthy  that  there  are 
alternate  rhymes  in  it  (e.g.  the  speech  of  Acacis  in  II.  i.).  Generally  in  this, 
and  in  the  later  plays  for  some  years,  the  couplet  ousts  blank  verse  altogether. 


372  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

variety,  and  the  songs  in  the  Elizabethan  drama  generally. 
They  are  of  much  greater  poetical  merit  than  is  usually 
allowed  ;  but  on  that  we  must  not  directly  dwell.  Our 
main  point  must  be  their  prosodic  character ;  and  to 
bring  this  out  we  may  best  take  the  whole  together, 
including  those  written  in  plays  subsequent  to  the  resump- 
tion of  non-dramatic  verse  in  the  Satires,  and  the  few 
that  exist  unconnected  with  plays  at  all.  The  two  great 
points  to  be  brought  out  by  the  examination  will  be 
found  to  be :  first,  the  power  shown  by  the  poet  in 
manipulating  measures  far  removed  from  the  regular 
decasyllabic ;  and,  secondly,  the  appearance  and  power  of 
the  anapcest — a  foot  which,  as  we  shall  see,  was  to  provide 
part  of  the  Asturias  in  which  the  faithful  of  true  English 
prosody  were  to  take  refuge,  during  the  triumph  of  the 
couplet  and  of  syllabic  uniformity,  in  the  eighteenth 
century. 

However  much  or  however  little  of  The  Indian  Queen 
may  be  Sir  Robert  Howard's,  there  can,  let  it  be  repeated, 
be  very  little  doubt  that  the  lyrics  are  Dryden's.  They 
include  the  octosyllabic  incantation  (Dryden  was  fond  of 
incantations) — 

You  twice  ten  hundred  deities, 

largely  changed  to  trochaics  in  its  Second  Part ;  and  a  more 
varied  "  Song  of  Aerial  Spirits."  But  it  is  noticeable 
that  in  neither  of  these  is  the  dissyllabic  foot  exceeded. 
Nor  is  it  in  the  songs  of  The  Indian  Emperor,  one  of  which 
is  very  beautiful.1  One  might  have  feared  from  these 
that,  as  far  as  Dryden  was  concerned,  English  lyric  was 
to  suffer  the  fate  which  French  had  already  undergone, 
and  was  to  become  merely  iambic  staple  lines  cut  into 
varying  lengths.  But  in  The  Maiden  Queen  we  come 
across  a  measure  which  Dryden  was  to  practise  several 
times,  and  which  is  curiously  susceptible  of  two  very 

1  Ah,  fading  joy  !  how  quickly  thou  art  past, 

Yet  we  thy  ruin  haste. 
As  if  the  cares  of  human  life  were  few, 

We  seek  out  new, 
And  follow  fate,  which  would  too  fast  pursue. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  373 

different  scansions.  It  may  have  been  suggested  to  him 
by  music  ;  but,  as  has  been  pointed  out  more  than  once, 
even  if  we  were  quite  sure  that  it  was,  and  that  the  music 
which  suggested  it  was  definitely  in  double  or  definitely 
in  triple  time,  that  would  not  settle  the  question. 
Now  this  measure,  which  is  also  that  of 

From  the  low  palace  of  old  Father  Ocean 

in  Albion  and  Albanius,  and  of  the  extremely  beautiful 
song  in  Cleomenes, 

No  !  no  !  poor  suffering  heart,  no  change  endeavour  ! 
may  obviously  be  taken  as 

I  feed  |  a  flame  [  within,  |  which  so  |  torments  me — 
iambic  hendecasyllables — or  as 

I  feed  a  |  flame  within,  |  which  so  tor|ments  me — 

dactylic  tetrameter  or  anapaestic  trimeter  with  anacrusis 
and  redundance,  as  may  be  preferred.  We  may  return 
to  this ;  meanwhile  a  stanza  of  each  shall  be  given 
below.1 

The  pure  anapaest  appears  first  in  Sir  Martin  Mar-all, 

1  I  feed  a  flame  within,  which  so  torments  me, 
That  it  both  pains  my  heart,  and  yet  contents  me  ; 
'Tis  such  a  pleasing  smart,  and  I  so  love  it, 
That  I  had  rather  die  than  once  remove  it. 

From  the  low  palace  of  old  Father  Ocean, 
Come  we  in  pity  your  cares  to  deplore  ; 
Sea-racing  dolphins  are  trained  for  our  motion, 
Moony  tides  swelling  to  roll  us  ashore. 

No  !  no  !  poor  suffering  heart,  no  change  endeavour  ! 
Choose  to  sustain  the  smart,  rather  than  leave  her. 
My  ravished  eyes  behold  such  charms  about  her, 
I  can  die  with  her,  but  not  live  without  her. 

In  this  last,  which  is  the  finest,  there  is  least  temptation  to  "  trisyllabise,"  and 
most  in  the  second.  As  for  the  first,  it  has  been  objected  that  you  cannot 
"stress"  that,  -which,  and,  etc.  I  demur.  "And"  I  hold  to  be,  at 
pleasure,  one  of  the  longest  and  one  of  the  shortest  syllables  in  English.  As 
for  the  others,  compare  Spenser's  tricks  in  his  elegiacs ;  and  remember  that 
these  trisyllabic  measures  were  only  in  the  go-cart.  But  I  admit  a  choice. 


374  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

which  has  two  examples,1  neither  of  the  specially  poetical 
kind,  but  both  good  light  tripping  examples  of  the  mere 
metre,  as  are  some  2  of  the  lyrical  additions  to  the  travesty 
of  The  Tempest.  Dryden's  exact  share  in  both  these 
plays  is  unknown  ;  and  there  are  reasons  for  thinking  it 
mainly  "  buck -washing."  But  if  anybody  claims  the  first 
set  of  songs  for  Newcastle,  and  the  last  for  Davenant, 
he  will  meet  with  no  protest  from  me.  There  are  no 
competing  claims  in  An  Evenings  Love,  and  here 
Dryden  shows  what  a  master  of  lyric  he  was.  The 
cadence  of 

You  charmed  me  not  with  that  fair  face, 

though  purely  iambic,  has  not  a  little  in  it  of  the 
ineffable  throb  and  soar  of  the  First  Caroline  wing ; 
while 

After  the  pangs  of  a  desperate  lover 

(which  seems  to  have  become  deservedly  popular)  has 
a  delightful  anapaestic  lilt,  and  is  very  interesting  to 
compare  with  the  hybrid  pieces  mentioned  just  now. 
Here  there  is  hardly  any  possibility  of  the  iambic  base 
having  been  meant — the  dropping  of  the  redundant 
syllable  in  the  even  lines  being  fatal ;  while  in  yet  a 
third  example — 

Calm  was  the  even  and  clear  was  the  sky, 

the  odd  lines  themselves  merely  complete  the  just 
anapaest.  The  gradation  is  of  the  first  prosodic  interest, 
and  the  execution  of  three  such  songs  by  a  master  of  the 
heroic  couplet  must  have  been  invaluable  for  the  retention 
of  the  liberty  of  English  prosody.  Nor  was  Dryden 
satisfied  even  with  this  good  measure,  for  he  added  a 
fourth  song,  the  pretty 

1  "Make  rea|dy  fair  la|dy  to-night"  and  "Blind  love  |  to  this  hour  Had 
ne|ver  like  me  |  a  slave  unider  his  power." 

2  For  instance — 

Where  |  does  the  black  |  fiend  Ambit  [ion  reside 
With  the  mis  chievous  deivil  of  Pride. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  375 

Celimena  !  of  my  heart, 

before  the  play  ended.1 

The  gorgeous  fustian  of  the  couplets  of  Tyrannic  Love 
is  diversified  by  three  lyrics  of  good  quality,  though  not  so 
good  as  the  set  just  quoted, — an  anapaestic  duet  of  "  Astral 
Spirits,"  and  two  solos — one  in  Pindaric  form,  and  one  of 
very  soft  and  flowing  trochees. 

That  palmary  example  of  the  heroic  play,  the  double 
Conquest  of  Granada,  does  not  contain  much  lyric,  but  what 
it  does  is  very  noteworthy.  The  "  Zambra  Song," 
"  Beneath  a  myrtle  shade,"  is  the  very  triumph  of  its  own 
peculiar  style,  with  the  sleepy  voluptuous  grace  of  a  por- 
trait by  Lely  transposed  into  metrical  expression,  and  only 
falling  short,  by  the  traditional  yet  all-important  "  that —  !  " 
of  the  highest  lyrical  rapture.  It  has  no  rapid  movement, 
and  requires  none.2  On  the  other  hand,  the  later — 

1  Part  of  all  four  must  be  given  : — 

You  charmed  me  not  with  that  fair  face, 

Though  that  was  half  divine  ; 
To  be  another's  is  the  grace 

That  makes  me  wish  you  mine. 

After  the  pangs  of  a  desperate  lover, 

When  day  and  night  I  have  sighed  all  in  vain, 

Ah  !  what  a  pleasure  it  is  to  discover 
In  her  eyes  pity  who  causes  my  pain  ! 

Calm  was  the  even,  and  clear  was  the  sky, 
And  the  new  budding  flowers  did  spring, 

When  all  alone  went  Amyntas  and  I 
To  hear  the  sweet  nightingale  sing. 

Celimena  !  of  my  heart 

Nothing  shall  bereave  you. 
If  with  your  good  leave  I  may 
Quarrel  with  you  once  a  day, 

I  will  never  leave  you. 

The  two  last  lines  of  this  last  have  a  delightful  explosion — 
It  will  |  be  the  |  devil  and  \  all 
When  we  come  together  ! 

2  Perhaps  the  second  stanza  is  the  most  beautiful — 

From  the  bright  vision's  head 
A  careless  veil  of  lawn  was  loosely  spread  ; 
From  her  white  temples  fell  her  shaded  hair 
Like  cloudy  sunshine,  not  too  brown  nor  fair  ; 
Her  hands,  her  lips,  did  love  inspire  ; 
Her  every  grace  my  heart  did  fire, 
But  most  her  eyes,  which  languished  with  desire. 


376  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

Whatever  I  am  and  whatever  I  do, 
My  Phyllis  is  still  on  my  mind, 

consists  entirely  of  the  freest- flowing  anapaests — a  little 
shallow  and  "  jingly,"  but  perfect  in  mere  motion  ;  and 
the  same  may  be  said  of  that  in  the  Second  Part — 

How  unhappy  a  lover  am  I. 

Poetically,  neither  of  these  two  is  the  equal  of  "  Beneath 
a  myrtle  shade  "  ;  but  the  trio  shows,  as  well  as  possible, 
from  the  prosodic  side,  how  this  poet  was  master  of  the 
double  mode,  now  languorous,  now  nimble. 

Marriage  a  la  Mode,  the  next  play,  practically  opens 
with  a  most  interesting  combination  of  these  modes,  such 
as ;.  Dryden  had  not  yet  tried.  This  combination — an 
iambic  common  measure  quatrain  followed  by  an  ana- 
paestic one  with  an  internal  rhyme  in  the  third  line — has 
been  widely  imitated  since,  and  has  an  excellent  bravura 
effect1  It  is  followed  by  a  still  livelier  composition 
entirely  in  anapaests,2  the  freshness  of  which — as  I 
remember  after  some  thirty  years — made  a  highly 

1  Why  should  a  foolish  marriage  vow, 

Which  long  ago  was  made, 
Oblige  us  to  each  other  now 
When  passion  is  decayed  ? 
We  loved  and  we  loved,  as  long  as  we  could, 

Till  our  love  was  loved  out  in  us  both  ; 
But  our  marriage  is  dead  when  the  pleasure  is  fled — 
'Twas  pleasure  first  made  it  an  oath. 

2  While  Alexis  lay  pressed 

In  her  arms  he  loved  best, 
With  his  hands  round  her  neck, 

And  his  head  on  her  breast, 
He  found  the  fierce  pleasure  too  hasty  to  stay 
And  his  soul  in  the  tempest  just  flying  away. 

Modern  readers,  accustomed  to  these  easy  measures,  may  forget  that  they 
were  not  easy  two  centuries  and  more  ago.  Such  things,  for  instance,  as  the 
varied  refrains,  with  internal  rhyme,  of  "  Calm  was  the  even  " — 

For  when,  with  a  fear,  he  began  to  draw  near 

He  was  dashed  with  a  Ha  !  ha  !  ha  !  ha  ! 
or 

And  just  as  our  bliss  we  began  with  a  kiss, 

He  laughed  out  with  Aha  !  ha  !  ha  !  ha  ! 

anybody  can  write  now ;  but  this  is  because  Dryden  and  others  wrote  them 
for  the  first  time  then. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  377 

respectable  editor  who  declined,  as  likely  to  shock  the 
public,  an  essay  of  mine  on  Dryden,  inquire  innocently 
"  why  I  had  not  put  this  in  ?  "  There  is  certainly  nothing 
like  it  that  I  know  of  in  English  before,  for  rattling  and 
galloping  melody,  except  "  Calm  was  the  even,"  cited 
before. 

That  rather  dull  play  The  Assignation  relieves  itself 
with  another  symphony,1  that  of  the  hybrid  hendeca- 
syllables  mentioned  above  with  a  shorter  coda,  which  at 
once  links  this  scheme  (and  possibly  the  others)  to 
"  Phillida  flouts  me."  But  it  was  not  likely  that  Dryden 
would  waste  good  lyrics  on  a  piece  of  occasional  rubbish 
like  Amboyna.  The  blank  verse  (such  as  there  is  of  it)  is 
so  bad  for  the  most  part  that  one  cannot  help  suspecting 
that  the  public  of  that  day  liked  bad  blank  verse — perhaps 
for  the  same  reason  for  which  Mr.  Fitz-Boodle's  beloved 
liked  bad  oysters — because  they  were  accustomed  to  it. 
For  the  same  reason  also — the  whole  purpose  of  the  thing 
being  popularity — he  gave  then,  in  the  "  Sea-fight "  song, 
one  of  the  half-doggerel  Pindarics  of  which  we  find  so 
many  examples  in  the  song-books  of  the  period.  But  the 
octosyllabic  couplets  of  the  "  Epithalamium  "  are  smooth 
enough. 

It  may  seem  extraordinary  that  the  "  opera "  of  The 
State  of  Innocence  (which,  by  the  way,  is  a  much  better 
thing  than  those  who  have  not  read  it,  but  who  very 
properly  hold  that  Milton  was  a  greater  poet  than  Dryden, 
may  think)  should  contain  no  lyrics.  It  may  be  that 
the  author  of  Paradise  Lost,  in  giving  his  famous  and 
characteristically  gracious  permission  to  "  tag,"  may  have 

1  Long  between  love  and  fear  Phyllis,  tormented, 
Shunned  her  own  wish,  yet  at  last  she  consented. 
But  loth  that  day  should  her  blushes  discover, 
"Come,  gentle  night,"  she  said, 
"  Come  quickly  to  my  aid, 
And  a  poor  shame-faced  maid 
Hide  from  her  lover  ! " 

Earlier  there  are  some  lively  t/iree-anzpxst  lines — 

For  'tis  of  a  nature  so  subtle 
That  if  it's  not  luted  with  care,  etc. 


378  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vii 

barred  lyric  patching.  But  I  think  there  is  a  simpler 
explanation.  The  piece  was  never  acted  ;  if  it  had  been, 
Dryden  would  probably  have  inserted  songs.  Still,  it  is 
certainly  not  a  negligible  thing  that  none  occur  in  the  two 
next  plays,  Aurengzebe,  that  fine  curtain  to  the  "Heroic" 
series,  and  All  for  Love,  that  still  finer  overture  to  the 
blank  -  verse  succession.  Dryden,  however,  as  careful 
students  of  him  know,  though  not  a  man  of  mere  whim,  was 
subject  to  curious  ebbs  and  flows  of  special  interest.  This 
tidal  state  of  his  mind  has  brought  upon  him  the  reproach 
of  inconsistency  in  criticism — it  is  a  much  better  explanation 
of  such  apparent  irregularities  in  practice  as  those  which 
we  are  now  noticing. 

It  was  not  merely  his  return  to  comedy  in  Limberham 
which  induced  him  to  revert  to  lyric,  though  that  ill-famed 
production  contains  two  pieces,  "  'Gainst  keepers  we 
petition  "  (fair  rollicking  ribaldry),  and  a  sentimental  song 
from  the  Italian.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  lyrical 
part  of  (Edipus  is  among  his  contributions,  and  not  among 
those  of  Lee.  It  has  been  observed  that  he  liked 
incantations  ;  and  it  may  be  added  that  while  he  has  left, 
proportionately,  but  few  catalectic  octosyllables,  those 
which  he  has  left  are  rather  varied  in  style,  and  always 
good.  The  scene  in  question  is  almost  (not  quite  wholly) 
in  the  trochaic  heptasyllable,  and  while  obviously  inspired 
by  Macbeth,  is  not  unworthy  of  the  inspiration.  The 
earlier  song  to  Apollo,  less  successful,  is  equally  interest- 
ing, because  of  its  combination — without  blending — of  the 
strict  and  the  equivalenced  octosyllable.  Do  this  in  odd 
lines,  and  not  in  regular  batches,  and  you  have  Christabel. 
There  was  no  room  here  for  the  hand-gallop  which  the 
light  cavalry  of  Dryden's  poetical  army  had  mastered  as 
thoroughly  as  his  infantry  had  mastered  the  march  of 
the  couplet  and  the  blank  line.  But  he  found  a  place  for 
it  in  Troilus  and  Cressida.  Let  it  be  observed  in  connec- 
tion with  the  question  of  "  Music  v.  Prosody,"  that  the 
prosodic  and  poetic  quality  of  this  piece  is  immensely 
improved  by  the  omission  of  the  "  vain  repetition  "  required 
by  the  setting.  A  short  piece  of  In  Memoriam  metre  in 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  379 

The  Spanish  Friar  is  also  spoilt  by  this  damnable  iteration 
— one  of  the  worst  injuries  which  music  does  to  poetry  ; 
but  Dryden  more  than  recovers  himself  in  the  other  lyric 
of  that  play,  "  Farewell,  ungrateful  traitor,"  which  joins 
the  music  of  the  seventeenth  century  to  that  of  the  nine- 
teenth, and  Dryden  to  Mr.  Swinburne.1  The  single  song 
in  the  Duke  of  Guise — the  second  play  in  which  Dryden 
collaborated  with  Lee — has  less  poetical  merit,  but  is  a 
pleasant  in-and-out  measure.  On  the  other  hand,  practically 
the  whole  of  Albion  and  Albanius  is  lyrical,  though  of 
the  libretto  kind.  Hardly  more  than  the  two  songs, 
"  Come  away,"  and  that  formerly  noted — 

From  the  low  palace  of  old  Father  Ocean, 

need  notice.  In  the  great  play  of  Don  Sebastian  he  put  no 
lyrics  ;  but  Amphitryon  has  several,  and  good  ones,  though 
rather  too  musical.  The  second  "opera,"  King  Arthur, 
has  over  the  first  the  advantage  that  its  bulk  is  blank  verse, 
not  libretto  mishmash  and  recitative — perhaps  also  that 
its  setter,  Purcell,  was  a  very  different  person  from 
"  Monsieur  Grabu,"  who  performed  the  office  earlier.  It 
is  not,  however,  only  thanks  to  him  that  "  Come  if  you 
dare  "  is  the  best  known  of  Dryden's  songs  ;  and  many  of 
the  rather  numerous  others  are  pretty,  though  one  would 
be  much  improved  by  a  slight  alteration  of  the  measures 
which  would  anticipate  some  well-known  later  movements. 
It  must,  however,  be  confessed  that 

Fairest  isle,  all  isles  excelling, 
though  pretty  in  itself,  has  a  certain  fore-echo  of  eighteenth- 

1  Farewell,  ungrateful  traitor  ! 

Farewell,  my  perjured  swain  ! 
Let  never  injured  creature 

Believe  a  man  again. 
The  pleasure  of  possessing 
Surpasses  all  expressing, 
But  'tis  too  short  a  blessing, 

And  love  too  long  a  pain. 

May  the  reader  be  respectfully  reminded  that  "  swain  "  was  not  hackneyed, 
and  "craytur"  not  a  vulgarism,  then?  (Cf.  as  to  the  metre  Drayton,  as 
quoted  above,  p.  102  sq.) 


380  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

century  namby-pambiness.  It  is  a  comfort  to  be  back 
in  Cleomenes  with  that  last  and  best  of  the  hybrids  so 
often  noticed,  which  is  one  of  Dryden's  greatest  lyric 
triumphs.  It  is  impossible  to  understand  how  any  one 
reading  it  can  deny  him  lyric  poignancy  and  "cry."  This 
is  the  only  lyric  in  the  play  ;  and  though  his  last  piece, 
Love  Triumphant,  contains  three,  one  of  them  is  by 
Congreve,  and  another,  on  jealousy,  is  not  of  much  account ; 
the  third — 

Young  I  am  and  yet  untried, 

is  the  best  here,  but  not  of  its  author's  best. 

Other  songs.  To  these  songs  in  the  plays  have  to  be  added  certain 
detached  examples,  printed  in  the  Miscellany  or  otherwise 
attributed,  which  may  or  must  be  Dryden's — the  smoothly 
flowing  "Farewell,  fair  Armida,"  and  its  answer  in  ana- 
paests ;  "  The  Tears  of  Amynta  for  the  Death  of  Damon," 
a  trochaic  placebo  and  dirige>  where  sentiment  does  not 
exclude  pathos  ;  the  galloping  gaillardise  of  "  Sylvia  the 
fair  in  the  bloom  of  fifteen,"  and  the  less  questionable 
in  subject,  but  equally  pretty,  "  Lady  of  the  May "  ;  the 
older-fashioned  and  really  charming  "  Ask  not  the  cause," 
and  its  companion,  "  Go  tell  Amynta,  gentle  swain "  ; 
"  Chloe  found  Amyntas  lying  "  ;  "  Happy  and  free,  securely 
blest "  ;  "  Fair,  sweet,  and  young,  receive  a  prize "  ;  and 
"  High  state  and  honours  to  others  impart "  ;  the  Secular 
Masque ;  the  songs  for  The  Pilgrim ;  and  yet  others. 
These,  with  the  two  Cecilia  Songs,  reserved  for  treatment 
with  Dryden's  other  odes,  make  a  very  considerable  total 
of  lyric  :  and  I  have  often  wished  that,  in  these  days  of 
innumerable  reprints,  some  one  would  make  a  book  of 
them  together. 

Such  a  book  would  not  only  do,  to  perhaps  our  greatest 
poet  of  the  second  order,  a  justice  to  which  he  has  long 
been  a  stranger ;  but  it  would  help  to  bring  out  a  point 
of  literary  and  prosodic  history  which  has  almost  entirely 
escaped  attention,  for  the  reason  that  when  the  facts  were 
known  nobody  was  likely  to  draw  the  inference,  and  that 
since  people  have  been  likely  to  be  interested  in  drawing 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  381 

the  inference  they  have  generally  been  ignorant  of  the 
facts.  This  point  is  the  immense  importance  of  the 
coincidence  and  persistence  of  Dryden's  practice  in  lyric, 
and  especially  in  the  lighter  triple  measures  thereof.  He 
was  establishing  the  supremacy  of  the  couplet,  and  bringing 
it  about  that  people  were  to  think — not  merely  (as  even 
Ben  had  been  inclined  to  think)  that  it  was  the  best  of 
all  measures,  but  that  it  was  practically  the  measure,  which 
every  other  measure  would  be  if  it  could — that  real  poetic 
virtue  and  orthodoxy  were  hardly  to  be  found  elsewhere. 
Yet  at  the  same  time  he  was  providing,  in  these  lyrics,  a 
perpetual  door  of  escape  from  the  prison,  a  perpetual 
warning  and  protest  against  the  over-generalisation. 

The  Odes — with  which,  if  we  call  Alexander's  Feast  The  Odes. 
"  Cecilia  Major,"  we  may  join  the  ten-years  earlier  "  Song  " 
for  the  Saint's  Day,  as  "  Cecilia  Minor " — constitute  a 
sort  of  bridge  between  the  quatrains,  couplets,  and  blank 
verse  on  the  one  side,  and  the  pure  lyrics  on  the  other. 
The  "  Anne  Killigrew  "  ode  or  epicede  is  the  severest  of 
all,  confining  itself  to  iambics  strophically  treated  :  and 
its  famous  opening  stanza  has  always,  and  deservedly,  been 
reckoned  as  one  of  the  finest  examples  of  its  kind.  The 
longer  Threnodia  Augustalis  on  the  death  of  Charles  I.  is 
on  the  same  model,  but  for  obvious  reasons  not  quite  such 
a  success,  though  it  contains  fine  passages.  Although 
Horace  and  English  Pindaric  are  as  opposite  as  possible, 
the  famous  verses  in  the  translation  of  Od.  i.  29,  "  Fortune, 
that,  with  malicious  joy,"  are  neither  more  nor  less  than 
magnificent.1  The  two  Cecilias,  being  definitely  intended 

1  This,  which,  with  its  sequel,  was  a  special  favourite  of  Thackeray's,  must 
be  given  once  more.  I  do  not  know  whether  it  or  the  better  known  (Anne 
Killigrew)  stanza  is  the  finest  example  of  English  Pindaric. 

Happy  the  man,  and  happy  he  alone, 
He,  who  can  call  to-day  his  own  : 
He  who,  secure  within,  can  say, 
To-morrow  do  thy  worst,  for  I  have  lived  to-day. 

Be  fair,  or  foul,  or  rain,  or  shine, 
The  joys  I  have  possessed,  in  spite  of  Fate,  are  mine. 

Not  Heaven  itself  upon  the  past  has  power  ; 
But  what  has  been  has  been,  and  I  have  had  my  hour. 

The  rest,  with   "  Fortune,  that,  with  malicious  joy,"  and   "  I   puff  the 


382  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

for  musical  setting,  and  not  hampered  by  the  epicedial 
gravity,  combine  the  Pindaric  and  the  strictly  lyrical 
appeal  ;  and  are  thus  very  interesting.  The  opening 
stanza  of  the  older  and  shorter  piece  is  a  fine  example  of 
Pindaric  ;  and  the  short  stanzas  attempting  to  express 
the  characters  of  the  different  instruments,  though  perhaps 
tours -de-force^  still  exhibit  the  "force"  of  Dryden.  He 
put  it  to  even  greater  trial,  and  with  more  success,  in 
Alexanders  Feast — "  Cecilia  Major  " — where  he  intermixes 
the  dissyllabic  and  trisyllabic  measures.  The  effect  is 
undoubtedly  artificial  ;  but  it  is  artful  as  well,  and  must 
have  exercised,  owing  to  its  unbroken  popularity,  an 
influence  enforcing — silently  and  unmarked  it  may  be,  but 
not  without  result — the  same  lesson  to  which  attention 
has  been  drawn  above.  If  the  great  Mr.  Dryden  con- 
descended to  these  "  irregular "  numbers,  could  they  be 
utterly  childish  and  inartistic  ? 
The  Hymns,  One  other  division  of  Dryden's  work  outside  the 

etc 

couplet  calls  for  notice,  though,  like  some  other  work  not 

brought  together  for  convenience,  it  may  be  later  than  the 
resumption  of  couplet  itself  in  the  Satires.  As  certainly 
known,  the  body  of  his  hymn-writing  is  a  very  small  one, 
but  there  are  at  least  strong  reasons  for  thinking  that  it 
ought  to  be  very  largely  supplemented.1  And  as  it 
happens,  the  prosodic  characteristics  are  noted  as  strongly 
as  possible  in  the  certainly  genuine  cases.  Indeed,  they 
supply  the  main  argument  for  the  addition  of  the 
"doubtfuls."  These  certain  pieces  are  the  paraphrase  of 

prostitute  away,"  is  a  little  less  sustained,  good  as  these  things  are.  But  the 
examples  referred  to,  and  many  others,  including  not  a  few  from  Threnodia 
Augustalis  itself,  contrast  most  strikingly,  not  merely  with  such  stuff  as 
Swift's  and  other  Pindarics,  which  we  shall  notice,  but  with  not  a  little  of 
Cowley.  Dryden  hardly  ever  fails  in  real  symphonic  effect ;  the  others  too 
often  simply  empty  sackfuls  of  wooden  bricks  of  different  sizes. 

1  See  the  present  writer's  revision  of  Scott's  Dryden  (Edinburgh,  1893) 
xviii.  269-281,  for  some  account  of  the  Hymns  in  the  Roman  Catholic  Primer 
of  1 706  and  their  attribution  to  Dryden,  with  some  carefully  selected  specimens, 
and  for  reference  to  Mr.  Orby  Shipley's  and  other  fuller  treatments  of  the 
subject.  I  was  prevented,  as  there  explained,  from  discussing  the  matter 
fully,  and  this  would  not  be  the  proper  place  for  doing  so  ;  but  I  have  seen  no 
reason  to  alter  my  opinion  that  the  probability  of  their  being  Dryden's  work 
is  very  great  indeed. 


CHAP,  i  DR  YDEN  383 

Veni  Creator  (which  has  been  glanced  at  already  in 
connection  with  the  fourteenth-century  version1),  the  Te 
Deum,  and  the  Hymn  for  St.  Johris  Eve.  In  these  and  in 
many  of  the  new  claimants  for  his  authorship  there 
appears  that  peculiar  massive  strength,  thoroughly  under 
command  and  not  in  the  least  clumsy,  which  is  Dryden's 
great  prosodic  note.  The  Veni  Creator  is  in  octosyllables,2 
the  Te  Deum  in  heroics,  and  the  St.  John's  Eve  in  a 
combination  of  the  two  ;  but  all  are  alike  in  the  massive 
resonance  of  the  single  line. 

And  so  we  may  return  to  his  couplet  work  itself,  still  The  couplet 
postponing,  however,  the  central  display  of  it  in  the  Satires,  translations 

In  so  vast  a  quantity  of  verse  of  this  kind  as  that 
contained  in  the  Miscellanies,  the  Juvenal,  the  Virgil,  and 
the  Fables,  it  is,  of  course,  inevitable  that  there  should  be 
some  passages  where  the  poet  settles  into  common  form. 
But  there  is  an  astonishing  number  of  passages  and  lines, 
colouring  and  characterising  the  whole,  in  which  he 
does  not  do  this.  He  avails  himself,  of  course,  of  his 
various  licences  (v.  infra},  including  what  I  was,  I  confess, 
surprised  to  find  when  I  went  through  the  Virgil  some 
years  ago — numerous  examples  of  the  fourteener.  But 
he  does  not  really  need  these  for  prosodic  effect,  though 
they  are  convenient  to  him,  as  even  Pope  found  the 
Alexandrine  convenient  later,  in  rendering  lines  and  phrases 
which  demanded  additional  room  in  English.  His  variety 
is  really  the  result  of  the  variety  of  his  individual  line  and 
couplet.  In  the  speeches  something  of  the  old  "  heroic  " 
emphasis  returns  :  you  could  not  expect  the  author  of 
Tyrannic  Love  and  the  Conquest  of  Granada  not  to 
remember  his  swashing  blow  when  he  came  to  such 
convenient  matter  as  the  Fourth  Book  of  the  &neid  or  the 
later  negotiations.  But  it  in  no  respect  prevails  through- 
out. Further,  the  Juvenal  differs  from  the  Virgil,  the 
Lucretius  from  the  Juvenal,  and  all  from  the  more  modern 
"  translations  "  in  the  Fables.  The  Floiver  and  the  Leaf  is 

1  Vol.  i.  pp.  131,  132. 

2  See  above,  p.  378,  for  remark  on  his  too  seldom  shown  command  of  this 
metre.      Of  the  lighter  or  Hudibrastic  form  of  it  we  have  from  him  only  the 
Epistle  to  Sir  George  Etherege,  which,  if  not  consummate,  is  good. 


384  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

perhaps  the  most  remarkable  example  of  the  singular 
adaptableness  of  this  apparently  massive  instrument  to  the 
fantastic  graces  of  the  delightful  original.  Theodore  and 
Honoria^  equally  good  in  itself,  is  less  surprising ;  because 
Dryden's  majesty  is  conceded,  and  his  lightness  is  not. 
In  fact,  when  the  varied  craftsmanship  of  these  pieces 
is  considered,  and  when  the  certainly  erroneous  "  major  " 
of  the  eighteenth  century — that  all  metres  would  be 
couplet  if  they  could — is  granted,  we  need  feel  no 
prosodic  wonder  when  we  find  even  such  a  man  as  Ellis, 
who  knew  nearly  the  whole  range  of  English  poetry  up 
to  his  own  time,  and  could  appreciate  it,  estating  some  of 
these  examples  as  "  topmost." 

This  translation -couplet  is  (of  course,  in  the  Virgil 
most  of  all)  specially  valuable  for  the  important 
comparison  with  Pope.  Dryden's  theory  of  the  process 
itself  is  well  known — that  you  should  rather  strive  to 
bring  home  a  parallel  or  analogous  effect  in  the  language 
of  translation,  than  endeavour  to  render  exactly  and 
literally  the  language  translated.1  It  naturally  follows 
from  this,  that  though  he  used  a  uniform  vehicle  in  almost 
every  case  his  management  of  it  varied — a  variation 
rendered  easy  to  him  by  the  elastic  character  of  his  model 
of  couplet  generally.  That  he  often  uses  his  own 
favourite  weighty  current — which  runs  to  the  end  of  the 
second  line  and  resounds  there  with  the  slap  of  a  wave  on 
the  shore — is  natural  enough  ;  natural  also  that  he  should 
often  develop  that  antithetic  arrangement  both  of  rhythm 
and  epithet  which  the  form  almost  inevitably  invites,  and 
which  was  rather  to  tyrannise  over  it  later.  But  he 
himself  allows  no  predominance  to  either  of  these.  The 
fine  description  of  the  stallion  in  the  Third  Georgic 2  is 

1  Its  merits  could  not  be  better  vindicated,  nor  could  its  faults  be  better 
brought  out,  than  in  the  passage  from  Horace  above  given.      This  is  magnifi- 
cent, but  it  is  not  Horatian. 

2  I.  ii.  1 20.     Here  at  least  one  line — 

Sharp-headed,  barrel-bellied,  broadly-backed, 

is  quite  Shakespearian  or  Miltonic  in  its  bold  independence  of  the  mere 
mechanical  mould  of  line  which  was  going  to  be  made  a  fetish,  and  in  its  vivid 
profile  of  the  object. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  385 

one  of  the  many  which  refute  Wordsworth's  most 
unjust  remark,  that  "  when  Virgil  has  his  eye  on  the 
object  Dryden  always  spoils  the  passage."  The  fact 
is  that  the  Lake  School,  including  even  Coleridge 
himself,  are  never  to  be  trusted  on  the  Augustans — 
thereby  supplying  yet  another  instance  of  the  almost 
universal  truth  about  a  period  and  its  immediate  pre- 
decessor. 

But  it  is  time  to  say  something  of  the  general  result  of  in  the  later 
these  various  practisings  :  in  the  tap  and  rally  of  the  sharply 
stopped  couplet,  in  the  more  "linked"  quality  of  the  enjambed, 
in  the  partly  individual,  partly  associated  blank  verse,  and  in 
the  lightness  and  variety  of  lyric.  When  Dryden  returned 
to  the  couplet  itself  in  non-dramatic  verse  after  his  dozen 
years  of  interval,  he  showed  a  really  astonishing  command 
of  the  form  which  he  had  by  this  time  elaborated,  and 
which  he  afterwards  preferred.  It  has  been  observed  in 
all  countries — from  Greece  to  France — which  have  been 
addicted  to  the  rather  ignoble  practice  of  first  submitting 
to  tyrants  and  then  taking  vengeance  on  the  tyrants' 
families,  that  this  vengeance  has  always  been  peculiarly 
savage  and  lasting.  And  it  has  been  so  seen,  outside 
politics,  with  regard  to  the  stopped  couplet,  which 
domineered  over  England  prosodically  for  nearly  a  century 
and  a  half.  Full  justice  has  rarely  been  done  to  it, 
though  the  enjambed  variety,  which  the  stopped  one  had 
itself  ousted,  has,  as  in  other  cases,  been  allowed  to  escape 
the  penalties.  Yet  no  one  with  a  catholic  ear  and  a  taste 
for  the  subject  can  well  help  admitting  Dryden's  form  of 
it  (as  he  was  to  practise  it  for  the  last  twenty  years  of  his 
life,  from  Absalom  to  the  Fables)  as  one  of  the  noblest 
vehicles  of  verse  ever  put  together.  Neither  he  nor 
any  one  else  during  its  flourishing  time  explored  quite  all 
its  capabilities.  It  is,  indeed,  false  to  say  of  Dryden,  as 
Landor  said  in  a  phrase  the  other  part  of  which  is  just 
enough,  that  he  is  "  never  tender  or  sublime."  Tenderness 
and  (in  one  sense  at  least)  sublimity  are  not  the  regions 
that  he  haunts  most  gladly,  though  the  famous  and 
beautiful  confiteor  in  the  Hind  and  the  Panther,  and  the 

VOL.  II  2  C 


386  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

charming  if  slightly  metaphysical l  "  daughter  of  the  rose  " 
addressed  to  Mary  Somerset,  do  not  require  much 
development  in  their  respective  ways  to  reach  these 
regions.  But  the  things  that  the  verse  does  are  so  many, 
and  are  done  so  admirably,  that  one  hesitates  to  say  what 
it  might  have  done  or  might  not.  To  begin  with,  it  has 
entirely  lost  the  touch  of  stiffness,  not  to  say  clumsiness, 
which  characterised  it  in  the  group  of  poems  on  the 
Restoration.  It  is  no  longer  a  giant's  club  or  mace  or 
morgenstern,KQ\.  even  an  irresistible  but  some  what  unmanage- 
able axe.  It  is  a  sword,  with  the  power  of  the  two-handed 
kind  and  the  alertness  of  the  rapier  miraculously  adjusted 
to  each  other,  so  that  neither  interferes,  and  both 
contribute.  In  satire  it  stings  and  swings  with  a  lightness 
of  motion  as  great  as  the  depth  and  sureness  of  its  blow ; 
in  argument  it  has  the  clearness  as  well  as  the  weight  of 
prose,  with  an  added  cogency  of  rhythmical  phrase. 
Metaphors  have  been  and  still  may  be  lavished  on  the 
consummateness  and  the  variety  of  its  achievement  of  its 
own  ends — above  all,  on  the  extraordinary  ease  and 
temper  of  the  prosodic  as  well  as  the  intellectual 
composition.  Dryden  never  overbalances  either  line  or 
rhyme ;  he  has  recovered  almost  before  his  lunge  is 
finished,  yet  it  is  finished  ;  and  at  the  same  time  he  never 
approaches  the  monotony  which  is  Pope's  great  fault,  and 
from  which  Akenside  and  Churchill  could  only  escape  by 
having  recourse  to  Dryden  himself. 

The  Prologues,  To  appreciate  the  full  range  and  power  of  this  extra- 
ordinary form,  it  is  necessary  to  take  in  the  Prologues 
and  Epilogues  >  which,  from  their  great  variety  of  subject, 
reinforce  the  examples  of  its  capacities  in  the  most 
desirable  manner.  With  them,  with  the  great  satires  and 
didactic  pieces,  and  with  the  more  original  part  of  the 
Fables,  we  have  such  a  body  of  exemplification  of  the 
possibilities  of  a  particular  form  as  exists  nowhere  else  in 
our  subject  save  in  the  dramatic  blank  verse  of  Shakespeare, 
the  epic  blank  verse  of  Milton,  the  stanzas  of  Spenser,  and 
perhaps  the  octosyllables  of  William  Morris.  The  "  stal- 

1  I  suspect  he  owed  a  little  royalty  on  this  to  the  much-abused  Cleveland. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  387 

warts  "  of  Pope  would,  of  course,  challenge  this  ;  but  I  am 
not  afraid  of  them.  Pope's  couplet  may  have  higher  if 
narrower  perfection,  but  it  is  a  peak,  not  a  range  :  and  if, 
in  its  mathematical  and  mechanical  regularity,  it  escapes 
some  flecks  and  flaws  which  Dryden's  carelessly  exhibits, 
it  has  corresponding  disadvantages.  Dryden's  antithesis 
is  scarcely  ever  merely  verbal  and  expletive  as  Pope's  is 
often,  and  Pope's  seldom  attains  the  absolutely  final 
touch  of  Dryden's  in  such  lines  as — 

They  got  a  villain,  and  we  lost  a  fool, 

where  you  will  find  that,  turn  and  re-turn  the  thing  as 
you  like,  it  only  becomes  more  crushing,  for  the  retention 
of  a  villain  is  surely  as  unsatisfactory  as  the  getting  of  a 
fool.  There  is  also  a  sort  of  buoyancy  in  Dryden's 
couplets  which  no  one  else,  except  some  clever  pupils  of  his 
own  like  Churchill  and  Canning,  has  succeeded  in  attain- 
ing. Here  is  a  chance-medley  from  the  Epilogue  to 
Albion  and  Albanius — not  of  the  best  nor  of  the  worst — 
which  will  illustrate  what  I  mean — 

The  saint  who  walked  on  waves  securely  trod 
While  he  believed  the  beckoning  of  his  God  ; 
But,  when  his  faith  no  longer  bore  him  out, 
Began  to  sink  as  he  began  to  doubt. 

In  this  buoyancy  he  has  at  once  merged  the  necessity  of 
pause  and  the  danger  of  the  self-moulded  line  ;  the  point, 
whatever  it  is,  is  taken  as  Conde  took  (or  did  not  take) 
Lerida — "  at  a  hand-gallop." 

The  adaptation  of  a  medium  of  this  kind  alike  to  The  Satires, 
satire,  to  didactic,  and  to  narrative  could  only  be  effected 
by  extraordinary  craftsmanship  ;  but  it  is  done.  The  great 
satiric  triumphs  in  the  series  from  Absalom  and  Achitophel 
to  The  Hind  and  the  Panther  are  still  comparatively 
well  known,  but  probably  few  people  have  given  themselves 
the  trouble  to  realise  how  much  the  mere  prosody  contri- 
butes to  them.  Such  satiric  "  whole-lengths  "  as  those  of 
Shaftesbury,  Buckingham,  Gates,  Bethel,  Shadwell,  Settle, 
require  no  ordinary  combination  of  qualities  in  the  verse 
that  is  to  carry  them  out.  It  must  be  swift,  but  not 


388  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

desultory  or  wanting  in  weight ;  solidly  moulded,  but  not 
monotonous.  It  must  build  up  the  satiric  structure  as 
Burke  later  prided  himself  on  building  his  prose,  with 
equal  and  accumulative  attention  to  the  idea  and  to  the 
imagery.  It  must  be  always  well  in  hand,  serious  without 
passion,  and  disdainful  without  loss  of  temper.  Every- 
where in  the  measure,  as  well  as  in  the  sense,  perfect 
command  has  to  be  manifested  :  the  poet  cannot  afford  to 
miss  a  hit,  to  fire  in  the  air,  to  boggle  anything  ;  and  he 
does  not.  It  is  almost  enough  to  say  that  the  passage  of 
Pope's  satire  which  most  reminds  one  of  Dryden  is  the 
character  of  Atticus,  and  that  the  principal  thing  which 
reminds  us  again  that  it  is  not  Dryden's  is  the  deadly 
earnest  of  it — the  absence  of  the  Olympian  quality.  Pope 
attacks  on  the  level,  or  from  below,  and  sometimes  from 
behind  ;  Dryden  always  from  above.  And  if  it  be  said, 
"  Oh  !  but  all  this  is  characteristic  of  the  meaning,  not  the 
form,"  one  can  only  say,  "  Pardon  ! "  To  the  present 
writer  at  any  rate,  all  the  characteristics  just  mentioned  are 
as  noteworthy  in  the  form  as  in  the  sense,  or  more  so.  We 
have  once  more  "  riding  rhyme " — verse  moving  easily, 
fluently,  for  all  its  formidable  punctuation.  Only  the 
chevauchee  is  no  longer  Chaucer's  graceful  "taking  the 
air"  on  horseback.  It  is  little  more  disturbing  to  the 
rider :  he  takes  his  exercise  almost  as  nonchalantly  as 
Chaucer  himself.  But  it  is  an  exercise  of  sword-hand  as 
well  as  bridle-hand.  He  does  not  "  accompany  each  blow 
With  a  Ha !  ,or  with  a  Ho  ! "  like  The  Bogle  ;  he  is  less 
gesticulatory.  But  he  is  like  that  redoubtable  champion 
in  another  respect — 

[For]  he  always  cleaves  his  foe 
To  the  waist ! 

The  didactic         But  the  argumentative  use  of  this  couplet  is  almost 
and  narrative  more  remarkable  than  the  satiric,  and  much  more  unique. 

pieces.  '  -1 

Here  Pope  is  altogether  inferior ;  the  didactic  and  argu- 
mentative parts  of  the  Essay  on  Criticism,  the  Essay  on 
Man,  and  the  rest  are  amateurish,  desultory,  feeble,  when 
compared  with  the  serried  reasoning  of  Religio  Laid,  and 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  389 

the  great  church -battle  of  the  Hind  and  the  Panther. 
Whether  such  things  should  be  couched  in  verse  at  all  is 
another  question  ;  but  one  may  certainly  alter  the  old 
hyperbole,  and  say  that  if  the  Gods  argued  cases  in  verse, 
they  would  use  the  verse  of  Dryden.  Its  curious  freedom 
from  the  obvious  and  salient  trick  which  damages  Pope's, 
its  strange  faculty  of  combining  without  running  on,  and 
even  what  some  call  its  "prosaic"  quality,  assist  it  mightily 
in  this  respect :  as  does  a  certain  other  faculty,  instanced 
in  the  great  satiric  pictures  above  noticed,  of  attaining  the 
verse-paragraph  in  couplet  itself. 

Nor  is  it  much  inferior  in  description  and  narration  of 
a  kind  ;  though  how  far  it  would  have  proved  suitable  for 
long,  varied,  much  incidented  narrative,  one  can  hardly 
say.  I  never  can  feel  quite  so  certain  as  Scott  did  that 

Dryden,  in  immortal  strain, 

Had  raised  the  Table  Round  again 

but  for  the  misconduct  of  King  and  Court  in  making  him 
toil  on  to  give  them  sport.  The  couplet,  unless  enjambed, 
is  not  a  very  good  medium  for  long  narrative  ;  but  in 
its  shorter  examples  in  and  out  of  the  Fables  it  proves  a 
very  fair  vehicle — in  Theodore  and  Honoria  more  especially. 
Yet  undoubtedly  it  is  greatest  in  satire  ;  and  it  is  there  so 
great  that  when  we  think  of  the  Second  Part  of  Absalom  or 
of  Mac-Flecknoe  there  is  no  room  for  anything  but  laughter 
and  applause.  The  thing  is  the  very  triumph  of  the 
particular  branch  of  poetic  and  especially  of  prosodic  art. 

Two  of  Dryden's  means  for  keeping  off  monotony  Pope 
deliberately  discarded  under  the  idea  of  "  correctness  " — 
bane  of  all  prosodic  thought ; *  and  each  of  these,  the 
triplet  and  the  Alexandrine,  deserves  mention. 

The    original    persuasive  to    both   is,  of  course,  clear  Triplets  and 
enough — it  is  simply  a  sense  of  too  narrow  room  in  the  Alexandnnes 

1  There  is  no  point  on  which  I  feel  more  strongly  than  on  this  pseudo- 
correctness.  Its  whole  mother-idea  is  wrong.  Varieties  of  verse  are  not 
aberrations  from  a  norm  :  they  are  on  equal  terms  with  it,  children  of  the 
same  parents.  It  is  not  even  the  eldest  son  :  it  has  no  rights  that  they  have 
not.  You  might  as  well  expect  a  clock  to  go  with  the  pendulum  always 
perpendicular  as  verse  to  go  rightly  with  an  unvaried  line. 


390  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

ten  or  twenty  syllables.  But  it  is  improbable  that  any 
one  could  practise  either  without  feeling  their  use  as  a 
corrective  of  monotony  as  well  as  a  promoter  of  ease.  I 
have  never  been  able  to  persuade  myself  that  the  giving 
up  of  them  was  not  one  of  those  rather  unreasonable, 
though  it  would  seem  quite  inevitable,  "  tightenings  up  " 
of  rule  which  have  spoilt  almost  all  games  at  one  time  or 
another.  The  triplet  has  no  doubt  a  slight  tendency  to 
burlesque,  and,  if  used  often,  throws  the  general  effect 
out  of  character  ;  but  then  it  is  the  poet's  business  to 
guard  against  these  results.  Both  in  descriptive  and 
argumentative  verse  it  is  of  great  importance,  and  has 
something  of  the  effect  of  a  parenthesis — that  figure  hated 
of  the  vulgar,  and  beloved  by  the  elect.  As  for  the 
Alexandrine,  we  have  made  the  antiquity  of  that  licence  at 
least  probable ;  and  it  is  one  which  should  never  be  given 
up  either  in  blank  verse  or  couplet ;  for  while  eminently 
useful  in  point  of  sense,  it  is  invaluable  for  varying,  with- 
out too  much  irregularity,  the  cadence  and  composition  of 
the  measure.  To  expand  it  still  further  to  a  fourteener, 
as  Dryden  has  (v.  supra)  sometimes  done,  is  indeed,  perhaps, 
going  too  far ;  but  in  about  the  only  instance  of  this 
which  occurs  in  original  and  important  work 1  it  seems 
likely  that  the  common  idea  of  "  suiting  the  verse  to  the 
sense "  had  a  good  deal  to  do  with  the  extravagance. 
The  Alexandrine  proper  has  no  burlesque  effect  unless 
very  clumsily  handled.  As  for  Pope's  well  -  known 
"  wounded  snake "  gibe,  it  is  enough  to  reply  that  the 
poet  has  no  business  to  let  his  snakes  be  wounded,  and 
that  nothing  glides  much  more  smoothly  or  briskly  than 
an  ««wounded  snake. 

It  is  indeed,  perhaps,  true  that  the  peculiar  weight 
and  massiveness  of  Dryden's  actual  decasyllabic  enables 
it  to  stand  the  "  thrust "  of  these  additions  better  than  a 
lighter  and  slighter  staple  may  do.  And  yet  it  seems 
rather  absurd  to  deny  it  the  epithet  "  light."  There  is 

1  Thou  leapst  o'er  all  eternal  truths  in  thy  Pindaric  way. 

The  Medal,  294. 

Dryden  was  pretty  certainly  thinking  of  Cowley's  note  quoted  above. 


CHAP,  i  DRYDEN  391 

already  nothing  "  heavy "  about  the  passages  which 
scorch  and  scathe  for  ever  in  the  two  Achitophels,  and 
the  Medal,  and  Mac-Flecknoe,  or  about  the  peculiarly 
graceful  description  of  The  Flower  and  the  Leaf,  which 
here  owes  nothing  prosodically  to  the  rhyme-royal  of  the 
original.  The  truth  is  that,  barring  the  absence  of  that 
diviner  aether  which  had  left  English  poetry,  and  was 
scarcely  to  return  till  Blake  conjured  it  back  from  some 
of  the  cloudy  regions  of  his  Forbidden  Countries  of 
prophecy,  there  is  hardly  anything  wanting  to  Dryden's 
prosody.  It  not  only  did  one  thing  supremely,  even 
though  that  may  not  have  been  an  absolutely  supreme 
thing  ;  but  it  did  an  astonishing  number  of  things  well, 
and  more  than  well.  One  feels,  however  much  one  may 
worship  the  earlier  Caroline  fancy  and  the  later  Romantic 
imagination — however  conscious  one  may  be  that  Dryden 
is  not  Blake  or  Coleridge,  Shelley  or  Keats,  Tennyson  or 
even  Browning  —  a  sort  of  indignation  at  having  to 
apologise  in  any  way  for  him.  We  may  with  him,  pro- 
sodically as  well  as  poetically,  as  a  whole  be  on  Earth  and 
not  in  Heaven.  But  (as  Browning  has  been  mentioned) 
his  Earth  is  so  good  that  it  seems  a  little  impertinent,  and 
more  than  a  little  ungracious,  to  inquire,  while  we  are  on 
it,  whether  Heaven  is  not  best. 


NOTE  ON  ALEXANDRINES  IN  CONTINUOUS 

VERSE 

IT  may  be  objected  to  the  remark  on  Pope  (sup.  p.  390)  that  he 
made  ample  amends  to  Dryden's  Alexandrines  elsewhere,  in  the 
equally  well-known  compliment  to  their  "  long  resounding  march 
and  energy  divine  " —  not  to  mention  that  his  objection  is  specifi- 
cally limited  to  end-lines.  But  it  is  clear  from  his  Letter  to  Henry 
Cromwell,  which  is  in  part  a  sort  of  prose  redaction  of  the  passages 
in  the  Essay  on  Criticism,  that  this  objection  was  wider.  For  he 
there  condemns  "  the  too  frequent  use  of  Alexandrines,  which  are 
never  graceful  but  when  there  is  some  majesty  added  to  the  verse 
by  them,  or  where  there  cannot  be  found  a  word  in  them  but  what  is 
absolutely  needful."  One  may  indeed  literally  accept  this  state- 
ment; but  if  it  is  examined  it  will  be  found  to  amount  to 
nothing  more  than  that  "  Alexandrines  are  never  good,  but  when 
they  are  good  " — and  so  to  intimate  an  evident  prejudice  against 
the  use.  It  is  somewhat  curious  that  neither  the  partial  return 
to  Dryden  after  Pope's  death,  nor  the  completer  reaction  against 
Pope  at  the  Romantic  revival,  dispelled  this  prejudice.  I  have 
endeavoured  to  show  that  in  Chaucer,  in  Shakespeare,  and  even 
in  Milton,  Alexandrines  may  be  admitted  with  no  loss  and  great 
advantage.  Yet,  except  Keats,  most  nineteenth -century  poets 
have  been  shy  of  them  :  although  Keats's  own  use  in  Lamia  shows 
how  excellent  they  may  be.  The  fact  probably  is  that,  as  has 
been  hinted  above,  not  all  poetical  building  is  strong  enough  to 
stand  their  thrust. 


392 


CHAPTER    II 

CONTEMPORARIES   OF    DRYDEN    IN    LYRIC,    PINDARIC, 
AND    COUPLET 

Arrangement — Relation  in  form  to  predecessors — "  Orinda  " — 
Aphra  Behn — Sedley — Rochester — Dorset — Others — Otway — 
Halifax — Mulgrave — Congreve — Walsh — The  later  Pindarics 
— Sprat,  Watts,  etc. — Otway  again — Swift — Yalden — Con- 
greve again — Couplet  verse — The  minor  heroic  dramatists  and 
the  satirists — Roscommon — Mulgrave  again — Others — Pomfret. 

THE  poets  to  be  mentioned  in  this  chapter  have  not  Arrangement, 
usually  held  a  great  place  in  histories  of  English  literature, 
nor  perhaps  have  they  deserved  such  a  place.  But  some 
of  them  have  been  ranked  rather  too  low  even  as  poets, 
while  as  prosodists  they  (or  at  least  the  lyrists  among 
them)  are  worthy  of  distinct  if  not  very  prolonged  atten- 
tion. The  chapter  would  have  gained  not  a  little  if  we 
had  separated  the  lyrical  part  of  Dryden  for  its  purposes  ; 
but  that  great  poet  has  lost  so  much  by  the  neglect  to 
consider  his  lyrical  work,  not  merely  in  addition  to,  but 
in  connection  with  his  other,  that  the  scheme  actually 
adopted  seems  preferable.  Here  we  shall  handle  those 
contemporaries  of  his  who  dealt  with  his  staple  metres 
and  styles — reserving  Prior  among  the  younger,  and 
Butler  among  the  elder,  as  captains  of  yet  other  hosts  in 
the  next.  The  first,  or  lyrical  group,  is  a  large  one,  and 
fringes  out  into  minor  poets  and  contributors  to  Drolleries 
and  Miscellanies^  and  the  famous  Pills  to  Purge  Melancholy 
(later  in  date,  but  mainly  contemporaneous  in  stuff),  after 
a  very  copious  and  floating  manner.  Its  work,  however, 
can  be  studied  not  only  sufficiently,  but  perhaps  best,  in 

393 


394  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

that  of  a  few  persons — the  famous  quartette  of  Restora- 
tion song-writers,  Dorset,  Rochester,  Sedley,  and  Aphra 
Behn,  heading  others,  from  Mulgrave  to  Congreve,  with  a 
few  isolated  persons  like  Katherine  Philips  for  the  earliest 
period,  Philip  Ayres  for  the  middle,  and  William  Walsh 
for  the  last. 

Relation  in  Perhaps  the  prosodic  note  in  regard  to  the  persons  to 
ciTce  torpre"  be  discussed  in  this  chapter,  lyric  or  not  lyric,  is  that  hardly 
one  is  of  sufficient  individuality  to  require  much  separate 
study.  The  interest  which  they  possess  is  interest  in 
relation  to  the  great  prosodic  forms  already  developed,  or 
in  process  of  development,  accordingly  as  they  may  show 
decadence  or  new  beginning  ;  and  the  new  beginnings 
will  be  shown  rather  in  the  next  chapter  than  in  this. 
The  very  first  question  which  should  put  itself  to  the 
student  of  prosody,  who  has  set  himself  at  the  right  point 
of  view,  is,  "  What  is  their  attitude  towards  the  two  greatest 
forms  of  earlier  Caroline  lyric,  the  common  measure  and 
the  octosyllabic  quatrain  ? "  And  it  so  happens  that 
these,  with  the  enlarged  forms  of  both  which  come  from 
the  addition  of  a  couplet,  or  two  interspaced  lines, 
changing  the  quatrain  into  a  sixain,  are  the  chief,  though 
not  the  only,  forms  that  they  use. 

The  answer  can  be  sufficiently  general,  though  it  will 
require  a  certain  amount  of  proviso  and  qualification  for 
individual  instances.  The  peculiar  grip  of  the  measure 
which  we  have  noted  in  the  First  Carolines  has  not  gone  ; 
but  it  is  going.  For  the  observation  of  this,  Katherine 
"Orinda."  Philips  is  a  peculiarly  useful  subject.  "The  matchless 
Orinda  "  lived  but  a  very  few  years  after  the  Restoration 
itself,  but  she  died  young  ;  she  was  born  in  the  very  same 
year  with  Dryden,  and  she  was  not  much  the  elder  of 
Sedley  and  Dorset,  both  of  whom  survived  into  the 
eighteenth  century.  She  is  also,  in  temper,  rather  older 
than  her  date  :  serious,  metaphysical,  and  if  prosaic  at 
all,  prosaic  because  she  cannot  help  it  rather  than  other- 
wise. Yet  the  prose  encroaches  on  her,  will  she  nill  she, 
in  this  metre  of  soar  and  throb.  Her  admirers  put  down 
her  submission  to  the  encroachments  as  a  result  of  "  artistic 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    395 

restraint " — a  very  convenient  thing,  but  perhaps  just  a 
little  too  convenient  for  the  mediocris  poeta.  Sometimes 
(examples  may  be  given  below) l  she  can  soar ;  but  she 
cannot  always. 

For    some    years    past,   her   graceless  junior   poetess,  Aphra  Behn. 
Aphra  Behn,  has  had  her  proofs  restored  to  her  in  this 
matter.       Critics   and    anthologists    have    reminded    the 
forgetful  general  reader  of  that  marvellous 

Love  in  fantastic  triumph  sat, 

which,  as  a  last  triumph  of  Caroline  mastery  in  these 
measures,  exceeds  the  best  things  of  Sedley  and  Rochester, 
because  it  can  not  only  tower,  but  maintain  itself  as  the 
summit  of  the  soar,  and  stoop  to  the  finish  of  its  flight  as 
masterfully  as  it  rose.  There  is  not  a  weak  point  in  this 
strange  achievement;  even  the  "did"  of  the  third  line  is 
not  a  mere  expletive.2  If  this  was  the  poetry  by  which 
Rochester,  in  a  partly  unquotable  piece  of  doggerel,  makes 
her  swear  that  the  bays  were  her  own,  Apollo  might  well 
say  that  it  was  hard  to  deny  her.  But  though  there  are 
good  things,  prosodically  and  otherwise,  in  the  rest  of  her 
verse,  she  never  reached  such  a  height  as  this  elsewhere, 
at  least  in  that  poetic  music  which  prosody  creates. 

The  tones  of  this  music  are  still  in  the  two  much  more 
graceless  poets  of  the  other  sex  (for  they  were  both  ill- 

1  Caroline  Poets  (Oxford,  1905),  i.  pp.  485,  612  : — 

I  did  not  love  until  this  time 

Crowned  my  felicity, 
When  I  could  say  without  a  crime 

I  am  not  thine — but  Thee  ! 

As  men  that  are  with  visions  graced 
Must  have  all  other  thoughts  displaced, 
And  buy  those  short  descents  of  light 
With  loss  of  sense,  or  spirit's  flight,  etc. 

2  Love  in  fantastic  triumph  sat 

Whilst  bleeding  hearts  around  him  flowed, 
For  whom  fresh  pains  he  did  create, 

And  strange  tyrannic  power  he  showed. 
From  thy  bright  eyes  he  took  his  fires, 

Which  round  about  in  sport  he  hurled  ; 
But  'twas  from  mine  he  took  desires 

Enough  to  undo  the  amorous  world. 


396  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

natured,  which  poor  Aphra  is  nowhere  charged  with  being) 
who  have  just  been  mentioned.  They  attained  it,  but  with 
much  less  sureness  of  touch.  One  knows  that  Sedley  has 
got  it,  and  one  hopes  that  he  is  going  to  keep  it,  in  the 
famous  piece  beginning — 

Love  still  has  something  of  the  sea, 
From  whence  his  mother  rose. 

Sedley.  But  he  does  not  keep  it  ;  and  though  the  rest  of  the 
poem  is  not  bad,  it  is  not  better  than  hundreds  of  others 
written  during  his  life-time.  In  "  Phillis  is  my  only  joy  " 
he  has  sought  a  lighter  and  more  varied  form,  derived 
rather  from  Suckling  than  from  the  great  joint  tradition 
of  Ben  and  Donne.  It  is  prosodically  notable,  in  particular, 
for  the  skill  with  which  the  iambic  and  trochaic  cadences 
are  combined  and  contrasted.  And  this  contrast-combine 
— a  purely  prosodic  device — is  noticeable  again  in  the 
"  Knotting "  song,  where  it  curiously  enhances  and  is 
enhanced  by  the  use  of  the  refrain.  Read  by  themselves 
these  three  poems  create  a  very  high  idea  of  Sedley's  lyrical 
powers,  though  no  one  is  so  entire  and  perfect  as  the 
Aphra  piece.  Read  among  the  rest  of  his  verse  (which  need 
not  be  ill-spoken  of),  they  seem  rather  chance-medleys. 

Rochester.  Rochester,  on  the  other  hand,  had  a  much  more  constant 
command  of  the  lyrical  secret  than  either  the  knight  or 
the  lady.  But  the  evil  angel  who  made  him  from  a  brave 
man  into  a  coward,  and  who  seems  to  have  been  able 
also  to  turn  him  from  a  scholar  and  a  good  fellow  into  a 
spiteful  fribble,  appears  to  have  been  further  able  to 
prevent  him  from  ever  keeping  a  poem  up  to  its  best 
level.  The  first  distich  of 

An  age  in  her  embraces  past 
Would  seem  a  winter's  day, 

runs  Sedley's  opening  close,  in  the  exquisiteness  of  the 
harmony  got  out  of  quite  simple  words  ;  and  the  conclu- 
sion of  the  stanza — 

Where  life  and  light  with  envious  haste 
Are  torn  and  snatched  away, 

is    not   unworthy   of  it.       But   the   rest  is  unequal,  and 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    397 

sometimes  purely  flat.  Much  the  same  is  the  case  with 
the  long-measure — 

Absent  from  thee  I  languish  still, 

and  with  others,  though  it  may  almost  be  said  that  none 
is  without  prosodic  melody.  The  most  sustained  is  the 
completely  trochaic 

My  dear  mistress  has  a  heart — 

very  charming,  and  perhaps  worthy  of  being  ranked  next 
to  Aphra's  in  thoroughness  of  success  in  verse  in  its  own 
kind.  Even  here  the  demon  has  made  him  careless  of 
rhyme.1  But  in  it,  and  in  one  or  two  others,  there  is  no 
failure  of  rhythmical  command  :  while  in  some — "  'Tis 
not  that  I  am  weary  grown,"  and  "  All  my  past  life  is 
mine  no  more,"  are  examples  in  different  keys — this 
command  is  consummate. 

Charles  Sackville  had  poetry  "  by  kind  "  ;  but  it  did  Dorset, 
not  take  in  him  these  rarer  and  more  haunting  forms, 
though  they  might  have  been  thought  exactly  corre- 
spondent to  the  clangour  and  witchery  of  his  great 
ancestor's 2  rhyme-royal.  He  is  rather  a  middle  term 
between  Suckling  and  Prior  in  light  verse  of  society  than 
a  music-maker  in  words  ;  and  skilful  as  is  the  run  of  the 
famous 

To  all  you  ladies  now  at  land, 

happily  as  the  ballad  touch  is  caught  and  half  burlesqued 
in  it,  its  fluency  and  ease  are  more  remarkable  than 
its  range  or  variety  of  tone  and  harmony.  In  fact, 
Dorset  always  turns  to  the  caricature.  The  brilliant  lines 
on  "  Dorinda " 3  (Catherine  Sedley,  who  proved  her 

1  Not  "weak"  and  "break,"  which  was  then  quite  justifiable,  but  the 
rhyming  in  one  short  poem  of  "  wander  "  and  "  wonder  "to  "  asunder." 

*  By  a  curious  set  of  chances,  though  Thomas  Sackville  was  the  first  and 
Charles  the  sixth  Earl  of  Dorset,  and  though  no  less  than  170  years  inter- 
vened between  the  birth  of  Thomas  and  the  death  of  Charles,  there  were  a 
bare  thirty  between  their  lives. 

3  Dorinda's  sparkling  wit  and  eyes, 
United,  cast  too  fierce  a  light, 
Which  blazes  high,  but  quickly  dies, 
Pains  not  the  heart,  but  hurts  the  sight. 


398  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

"  sparkling  wit,"  among  many  other  things,  by  the  best 
epigram  ever  attributed  to  a  king's  mistress)  are 
thoroughly  characteristic.  The  first  stanza  reads  like  a 
beginning  in  the  old  metaphysical  style  with  the  old 
metaphysical  soar  a  little  but  not  so  very  much  vulgarised  ; 
the  first  distich  of  the  second  keeps  the  tone  ;  and  then 
the  last  does  what  itself  describes,  turns  sharply  round 
and  "  thrusts  its  brightness  in  your  face,"  with  complete 
travesty  and  denial  of  all  passion.  A  tour  de  force  of 
this  kind  could  only  be  achieved  when  prosody  has  gone 
very  far,  for  it  needs  absolute  sureness  of  touch ;  but  the 
touch  has  to  be  imitative  rather  than  original,  rhetorical 
rather  than  poetical.  Even  in  his  best  though  not  his 
most  popular  thing — 

Phyllis,  for  shame  let  us  improve, 

though  he  is  almost  serious,  there  is  something  like  the 
same  •a^^ia-rpo^ov,  the  same  quick  twist  and  shift  in  the 
close.  But  it  must  be  admitted  that 

Most  miserably  wise, 

admirable  as  it  is,  deserves  the  admiration  for  a  pure 
prosodic  merit,  the  position  of  the  tetrasyllable  "  miserably" 
(with  strong  stress  on  one  of  its  four  naturally  short 
syllables,  and  the  others  hurried  over),  between  the  two 
naturally  strong  monosyllables  "  most "  and  "  wise." 
Others.  The  character  which  appears  so  eminently  in  the  best 
things  of  Aphra,  of  Sedley,  and  of  Rochester ;  less 
eminently  but  more  evenly  in  "  Orinda,"  and  to  no  small 
extent,  proportionally  speaking,  in  Dorset's  handful  of 
verse,  is  widely  scattered,  though  seldom  in  large  volume, 
throughout  a  great  host  of  forgotten  or  but  name-remem- 
bered minorities.  One  might  compare  it  to  the  light  of  the 
Queensland  opal,  which,  instead  of  being  concentrated  on 
one  pervading  glow  of  colour  and  fire,  as  in  the  Oriental 

Love  is  a  calmer,  gentler  joy, 

Smooth  are  his  looks  and  soft  his  pace — 

Her  Cupid  is  a  blackguard  boy 

That  runs  his  link  full  in  your  face. 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    399 

and  Hungarian  varieties,  is  peppered  over  the  substance 
of  the  stone  in  small  sparks  and  flakes.  Not  to  do  in- 
justice to  the  Colonies,  it  must  be  granted  that  Queens- 
land peppers  her  opals  more  generously  than  the  minor 
Second  Carolines  cared,  or  could  afford,  to  do  with  theirs. 
Still  it  is  there,  as,  practically  speaking,  it  never  is  in  the 
eighteenth  century  till  we  come  to  Blake,  or  at  least 
Chatterton.  Otway,  a  powerful  dramatist,  was  a  very  otway. 
weak  poet.  But  the  little  piece  "  The  Enchantment "  is 
a  curious  poetic-prosodic  study — its  music  floats  so  oddly 
between  the  ^Eolian  harp  of  the  seventeenth  century  and 
the  harmonicon  or  hurdy-gurdy  of  the  eighteenth.  The 
first  stanza,  though  it  is  no  wonder,  actually  invites  the 
hand  to  keep  time,  with  the  sleepy  magic  of  the  earlier 
measure  ;  the  second  is  colder,  and  the  third  colder  still, 
but  not  quite  "  Edwin  and  Angelina "  yet.  Halifax  Halifax. 
(Montagu)  may  have  been  something  of  a  statesman,  but 
was  even  less  of  a  poet  than  Otway. 

But  in  no  one  of  these,  perhaps  hardly  even  in  any  of  Muigrave. 
the  preferred  list  before  except  in  Rochester,  is  the  old 
touch  to  be  found  so  frequently,  yet  so  flawed,  as  in 
Rochester's  chief  enemy,  himself  another  type  of  Restora- 
tion character,  the  valiant,  brutal,  honourable,  covetous, 
long-lived,  many-titled  John  Sheffield,  Earl  of  Muigrave, 
Marquis  of  Normanby,  and  Duke  of  Buckinghamshire]. 
He  has  got  the  touch,  a  little  worn  but  unmistakable,  in 

I  must  confess  I  am  untrue 
To  Gloriana's  eyes, 

for  the  common  measure  ;  he  has  got  it  for  the  long  in 
"  The  Dream  " — which,  by  the  way,  is  obviously  misprinted 
in  Chalmers.  In  fact,  though  never  quite  in  quintessence 
(which  puts  him  below  Rochester),  he  has  a  full  dozen 
of  right  pieces — "  The  Warning,"  "  To  Amoretta,"  "  The 
Venture,"  "  Despair  "  (which  is  in  the  "  short "  measure,  the 
split  "  poulter's,"  less  used  than  the  others  since  Elizabeth's 
days),  "  Reconcilement,"  and  others.  Nay,  though  it  is 
perhaps  unfair,  one  can  hardly  read  Sheffield's  lyrics  with- 
out remembering  the  persistent  association  of  Dryden's 


400  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

name  with  his  in  regard  to  couplet  verse.  One  lyric  of 
the  Earl's  (he  was  only  Duke  quite  late,  but  inherited  the 
Earldom  as  a  child),  the  dialogue  "  Between  an  Elderly 
Shepherd  and  a  very  Young  Nymph,"  is  Dryden  aut 
diabolus ;  unless  his  lordship  was  a  most  successful  ape  of 
the  poet  whom  he  got  into  scrapes,  patronised  in  bad  as 
well  as  good  senses  of  the  word,  did  not  help  to  starve, 
but  did  help  to  bury,  or  at  least  to  entomb. 

The  touch  is  almost  gone  in  Philip  Ayres,  pleasant 
as  are  some  of  his  verses  ; *  but  it  exists  in  Flatman  and 
Bancks,  and  others  yet  lower.  And  it  is — let  it  be 
repeated,  as  we  are  leaving  and  losing  it — in  the  main, 
though  not  wholly,  a  prosodic  touch,  provided  by  skilful 
or  lucky  fingering  of  the  stops  and  vents,  the  light  and 
heavy  places,  of  the  line,  which  gives  value  and  nuance 
to  the  result.  Already  in  Congreve,  and  even  in  Prior 
(who  for  that  reason  among  others  is  reserved  for  the 
next  chapter),  it  is  being  exchanged  for  a  merely  even 
beat — for  rhythm  with  some  resonance  and  swell,  but 
without  soar  and  stoop. 

Congreve.  Yet  Congreve  has  some  of  it,  and  so,  though  much 
younger  than  most  of  them,  he  may  be  made  the  last 
of  this  batch.  He  is  as  exceptional  in  it  as  elsewhere, 
in  drama  and  in  prose.  We  shall  deal  presently  with 
his  Pindarics.  Some  of  the  smaller  pieces  have  the 
felicity  of  Prior  with  a  certain  air  de  grand  seigneur,  the 
solace  of  Congreve's  sin,  which  Prior  could  never  reach. 
Thackeray  set  the  seal  long  ago  upon  "  Pious  Selinda  "  ; 
the  song — 

False  though  she  be  to  me  and  love, 

if  it  be  but  Bristol  diamond,  is  Bristol  diamond  of  the 
best  kind.  Amoret,  Sabina,  Aminta,  Cloe,  though  it  may 
be  feared  that  they  might  have  something  to  complain 
of  Mr.  Congreve,  must  have  been  difficult  to  please 
indeed  if  they  were  not  satisfied  with  Mr.  Congreve's 
verses.  They  are  not  exactly  prosodic  magic,  but  they 
are  astonishing  prosodic  conjuring,  and  about  the  last 
of  their  kind. 

1  See  Minor  Caroline  Poets,  vol.  ii.  pp.  261-365. 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DR  YDEN  IN  L  YRIC    401 

Between  the  lyrists  proper  and  the  Pindarisers  who  Walsh, 
consciously  or  unconsciously  sought  to  make  up  for  this 
loss  by  mechanical  irregularity,  one  small  poet,  but 
remarkable  prosodist,  may  be  picked  in  the  person  of 
"  knowing  Walsh."  There  was  reason  for  the  respect 
with  which  both  Dryden  and  Pope  regarded  him — the 
one  from  the  position  of  established  monarchy,  the  other 
from  that  of  eager  aspiration.  Small  as  is  Walsh's 
poetic  baggage,  it  is,  from  the  prosodic  point  of  view 
singularly  varied  and  not  ill-composed.  He  has  the 
common  measure,  not  quite  untongued  of  its  magic  ;  he 
has  actually  a  sonnet,  and  not  such  a  very  bad  one  ;  he 
has  stanzas  of  various  kinds,  once  popular,  but  ten  years 
before  his  own  death  to  be  banished  by  Bysshe  from  the 
English  Parnassus ;  he  has  anapaests  which  are  not 
worse  than  some  of  Prior  and  much  of  Moore  ;  long 
measure ;  at  least  one  couplet  of  rhymed  fourteeners 
curiously  unlike  in  rhythm  to  anything  that  had  been 
written  for  nearly  a  hundred  years,  or  was  to  be  written 
for  another  hundred  ; l  and  one  piece  in  anapaestic  mono- 
meters  which  is  equally  quaint  and  effective  in  prosody 
and  in  point2  Whether  he  was,  as  Dryden  says,  "  the 

1  I  see  her  smile,  I  see  her  kiss,  and  oh  !  methinks  I  see 

Her  give  up  all  those  joys  to  him  she  should  reserve  for  me. 
These  couplets  come  at  the  end  of  the  eight-lined  stanzas  of  "Jealousy," 
arranged  10,  10,  10,  10,  8,  8,  14,  14,  ababccdd.     Most  have  prosodic  blood 
in  them  ;  indeed,  some  readers  may  prefer  this — 

Nay,  in  the  fury,  in  the  height,  of  that  abhorred  embrace 
Believe  you  thought,  believe,  at  least,you  -wished  me  in  the  place. 

2  A  despairing  lover  goes  to  a  precipice  to  commit  suicide. 
When  in  rage  he  came  there, 
Beholding  how  steep 
The  sides  did  appear, 
And  the  bottom  how  deep  ; 
His  torments  projecting, 
And  sadly  reflecting 
That  a  lover  forsaken 
A  new  love  may  get, 
But  a  neck  when  once  broken 
Can  never  be  set ; 
And  that  he  could  die 
Whenever  he  would, 
But  that  he  could  live 
But  as  long  as  he  would, 

etc.  etc. 

VOL.  II  2  D 


402  THE  AGE  OF  DRY  DEN  BOOKVII 

best  critic  in  the  nation " — it  is  well  known  that  with 
contemporaries  who  were  his  friends,  and  sometimes 
without  that  limitation,  Dryden's  praises  require  a  little 
discounting — or  was  not,  he  must  have  possessed  a  very 
remarkable  ear,  open  to  the  notes  of  various  quills  as 
no  other  then  was  except  Dryden's  own.  He  need  not 
be  taken  very  seriously  as  a  poet ;  but  as  a  versifier  he 
must  always  hold  a  remarkable  position. 

The  later  In  pity  for  the  reader  I  shall  not  say  very  much  about 

Pindarics.    tjie  }ater  Pindarics,  although   I   have  had  no  pity  upon 

myself    in     reading    them.      The    chief    result    of   being 

married   to    their    muse,    however,    is    a    not    unpleasant 

Sprat,         amazement.     From  Sprat,   Cowley's  immediate  pupil  and 

Watts,  etc.  biographer,    with    his    description    of   angels    embodying 

themselves — 

For  which  they  fetched  stuff  from  the  neighbouring  air 

(I  have  always  wished  to  read  "  fair  "),  to  good  Dr.  Watts 
with  his  not  wholly  dissimilar  description  of  humanity 
itself  as 

Arrayed  in  rosy  skin  and  decked  with  eyes  and  ears, 

they  are  truly  marvellous.  Even  from  Johnson's  Essay 
on  Cowley  a  shrewd  person  might  perceive  that  the 
"  metaphysical "  reproach  is  chiefly  levelled  against,  or  at 
least  largely  evidenced  from,  Pindaric  ;  it  is  certain  that 
fancies  and  conceits  which  are  charming  in  the  lighter 
lyric  seem  most  barbarically  bedizened  in  this  form.  Its 
attractions,  however,  are  likewise  very  easily  perceivable, 
putting  aside  mere  fashion,  which  had  a  good  deal  to  do 
with  it.  It  gave  the  reader  the  variety  which,  no  doubt, 
he  really  missed,  though  he  did  not  think  so,  in  the 
couplet.  It  had  the  more  subtle  charm  of  giving  the 
writer,  if  not  exactly  carte  blanche,  at  any  rate  almost  as 
much  freedom  from  galling  and  cramping  punctilio  as 
might  consist  with  anything  but  the  absence  of  rhythm 
and  rhyme  altogether.  Very  frequently,  too,  he  did  not 
trouble  himself  much  even  about  these.  Sprat  certainly 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    403 

did  not.      He  has,  in  the  ode  above  quoted  (the  glorification 
of  Cowley  himself),  such  lines  as — 

And  in  natural  embraces  lay, 
or,  again — 

And  their  light  some  human  shapes  do  dress, 

which,  if  they  are  anything,  are  Chaucerian  acephala. 

In  this  undress — freed  alike  of  the  restraints  of  stanza 
and  couplet,  and  by  prescription  entitled  to  pay  not  much 
attention  to  sense — the  poet  could  ramble  on  as  long  as 
he  chose,  and  come  to  an  end  of  his  ramble  when  he 
chose  likewise.  Sometimes  he  achieved  quite  a  re- 
spectable piece  of  rhymed  and  rhythmed  prose  of  a 
rhetorical  kind :  as  in  one  out  of  a  hundred  possible 
examples,  Halifax's  Ode  on  the  Marriage  of  the  Princess 
Anne  to  "  Est-il-possible  ?  "  Sometimes  he  produced  Otway  again. 
something  like  the  following  sprout  of  the  brain  of  the 
author  of  Venice  Preserved — 

Never  would  he  learn  as  taught, 
But  still  new  ways  affected,  and  new  methods  sought. 

Not  that  he  wanted  parts 
To  improve  in  letters  and  proceed  in  arts  ; 

But  as  negligent  as  sly, 
Of  all  perverseness  brutishly  was  full, 
By  nature  idle,  loved  to  steal  and  lie, 

And  was  obstinately  dull. 

It  may  be  feared  that  most  people  who  read  the 
average  Pindaric  of  the  late  seventeenth  and  early 
eighteenth  centuries  will  find  it  obstinately  dull.  That  it 
need  not  be  so  is  certain  ;  the  famous  stanza  referred  to 
a  few  pages  back  from  Dryden's  "  Anne  Killigrew  "  ode  is 
enough  by  itself  to  prove  that,  and  can  be  backed  by  others. 
But  the  Pindaric — like  blank  verse  and  like  all  verse 
that  is  apparently  loose — is  far  more  difficult  than  things 
that  look  easier.  It  is  easy  to  write  it  badly  :  in  fact,  bad 
Pindarics  and  bad  blank  verse  merely  require  a  very  little 
practice  to  be  as  easy  to  write  as  bad  prose.  A  statute 
enjoining  either  use  in  Parliament,  or  platform,  or  pulpit 
would  be  no  hardship  on  any  but  the  merest  cretin. 


404  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKvr 

But  to  write  good  Pindaric  simply  means  the  ability  to 
produce  a  good  word-and-line  symphony  ;  and  the  man 
who  can  do  this  can  do  anything. 

Swift.  Dryden,  himself  hardly  greater  as  poet  than  as  critic, 
of  course  knew  this  perfectly  well  both  in  theory  and  by 
practice.  And,  though  he  was  as  good-natured  in  the  one 
capacity  as  he  was  unassuming  in  the  other,  he  could 
hardly  have  passed  any  other  than  the  judgment  which 
earned  the  undying  enmity  of  "  Cousin  Swift "  on  the 
Pindarics  of  the  latter.  Swift's  other  verse,  with  which  we 
shall  deal  in  the  next  chapter,  is  far  from  deserving  or 
justifying  the  doom  ;  and  if  the  words  were  ever  pronounced 
at  all,  it  is  nearly  certain  that  the  form  in  which  they  are 
usually  not  quoted,  "  You  will  never  be  a  Pindaric  poet," 
is  the  true  one.  The  odes  to  Temple  and  to  the 
Athenian  Society  (that  to  King  William  is  in  quatrains 
and  of  a  different  stamp)  are  not  precisely  absurd.  It  is 
difficult  to  imagine  Swift  being  that.  Nor  do  they  hobble 
like  some  of  the  examples  just  quoted.  They  are  rather 
like  the  contemporary  and  subsequent  French  verse  of  the 
same  kind  from  Boileau  to  Escouchard  Lebrun — prose  of 
a  rhetorical  kind,  carefully  cut  into  patterns  and  tipped  at 
the  edges  with  rhymes.  They  are,  in  fact,  what,  to 
unintelligent  or  excessive  criticism,  Dryden's  own  verse 
has  sometimes  seemed  to  be.  One  of  the  best  stanzas,  or 
rather  part  of  one  (for  Swift  allows  himself  even  more 
expatiation  than  most  of  his  fellows),  may  be  given  below.1 
It  will  be  seen  that,  putting  aside  the  ideas,  which  do  not 
specially  concern  us,  the  prosody  is  sufficiently  correct, 
according  to  mere  specification,  and  the  diction,  of  its  own 

1  The  eager  Muse  took  wing  upon  the  wave's  incline, 
When  War  her  cloudy  aspect  just  withdrew, 
When  the  bright  sun  of  Peace  began  to  shine, 
And  for  a  while  in  heavenly  contemplation  sat 

On  the  high  top  of  peaceful  Ararat ; 

And  plucked  a  laurel  branch,  for  laurel  was  the  first  that  grew, 
The  first  of  plants  after  the  thunder,  storm,  and  rain  ; 
And  thence,  with  joyful  nimble  wing, 

Flew  dutifully  back  again, 
And  made  a  humble  chaplet  for  the  King. 

The  whole  stanza  has  twenty-six  lines. 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    405 

inflated  kind,  not  specially  frigid  or  inappropriate.  But 
the  varying  lengths  of  line  are  ill-assorted,  the  rhymes  ill- 
distributed,  the  words  scarcely  ever  placed — perhaps  the 
chief  exception  is 

On  the  high  top  of  peaceful  Ararat — 

so  as  to  give  colour  and  light  and  ordonnance  to  the  parts 
of  the  composition.  And  this  is  the  general  fault  of  what 
may  be  called  the  middle  Pindaric — that  which  steers 
fairly  clear  of  extravagance  or  bathos,  but  merely  steers 
clear  of  them,  and  does  not  attain  sublimity  or  splendour. 

One  point  just  mentioned — -the  juxtaposition  of  line- 
lengths — is  of  the  highest  importance  in  the  prosodic 
criticism  of  the  irregular  Pindaric.  Swift  does  not  begin 
badly  in  the  stanza  just  quoted  ;  his  first  quintet  of 
Alexandrine,  two  heroics,  Alexandrine,  and  single  heroic, 
"  squads  "  well  enough  together,  and  the  as  yet  uncoupled 
"  drew  "  gives  the  hearer  a  rhyme  to  expect  on  old  Lycidas 
principles.  But  the  fourteener  and  Alexandrine  that 
follow  are  out  of  keeping,  and  the  subsequent  octosyllabic 
couplet  and  single  heroic  more  out  still.  The  hungry  ear 
pricks  up  and  is  not  fed. 

And  so  constantly.  Harshness  or  insignificance — these  Yaiden. 
are  the  two  curses  of  the  minor  Pindarics.  The  eminent 
Yaiden,  in  whom  Johnson  discovered  "  one  stanza  of 
exquisite  beauty,"  wrote  the  "  Hymn  to  Darkness "  (in 
which  this  occurs)  in  a  regular  quatrain  of  a  heroic,  two 
octosyllables,  and  an  Alexandrine  ;  but  he  "  Pindarised  " 
freely,  and  it  is  quite  clear  that  he  used  Dryden  to  correct 
and  corroborate  Cowley.  His  proportions  are  better  than 
Swift's  ;  but  that  is  about  all  that  can  be  said  for  him,  except 
that  he  has  a  noticeable  tendency  to  reduce  the  range  of 
his  lines,  and  use  a  very  large  share  of  decasyllabics.  In 
other  words,  he  is  something  of  a  deserter  from  the 
Pindaric  proper — the  very  essence  of  which  is  length- 
variety. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  multiply  examples  of  it ;  and  I  Congreve 
should  hardly  be  thanked  for  doing  so  even   if  it  were.  agair 
But    Congreve  once  more  calls  for  notice  in  connection 


406  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

with  it,  both  for  his  irregular  and  his  regular  odes. 
Johnson,  who  was  disproportionately  kind  to  the  famous 
passage  in  The  Mourning  Bride,  has  made  up  for  it  by 
rather  sharp  strictures  on  the  frigidities  of  Congreve's 
Elegies  ;  but  these  were  usually  in  couplet.  "  On  Mrs. 
Arabella  Hunt  Singing  "  is  a  very  pretty  Pindaric,  with  an 
unusual  harking  back  to  the  metaphysical  diction  which 
after  all  suits  it  best,  but  which  doubtless  made  Johnson 
hate  it.  The  translations  from  Horace,  though  Dryden 
had  set  the  example,  could  hardly  be  good.  But  the 
regular  Odes,  with  their  critical  Preface,  have  the  greatest 
interest  for  us  in  the  example  which  they  set  to  Gray, 
and  some  in  themselves.  It  is  to  be  feared  that  very  few 
of  the  compositions  of  which  we  have  been  speaking, 
including  his  own,  escape  the  sweeping  description  :  "  A 
bundle  of  rambling  incoherent  thoughts,  expressed  in  a 
like  parcel  of  irregular  stanzas,  which  also  consist  of  such 
another  complication  of  disproportioned,  uncertain,  and 
perplexed  verses  and  rhymes."  He  excepts  Cowley — that 
he  did  not  except  Dryden,  to  whom  he  was  always  faithful, 
and  who  had  deserved  his  fidelity,  is  probably  due  to  the 
fact  that  Dryden  did  not  call  his  Odes  Pindaric.  As  for 
Congreve's  own  "  regular "  attempts,  they  deserve  fair 
commendation  ;  but  with  the  remark  (which  may  shock 
some  readers)  that  it  is  doubtful  whether  regularity  by 
itself  is  here,  any  more  than  elsewhere,  a  gain  in  English. 
The  mere  correspondence  of  strophe,  antistrophe,  and 
epode  derives  its  attraction  for  the  ear  mainly  from  the 
musical  accompaniment  which  all  English  poetry  is  better 
without ;  and  if  irregular  stanzas  are  as  good  as  the  best 
of  Cowley  and  Dryden,  they  will  gain  nothing  from  the 
fact  of  there  being  another  like  them  elsewhere.  If  they 
are  bad,  the  absence  of  something  like  them  may  be  a 
possible  good.  The  advantage  of  the  regular  Ode  is 
chiefly  that  it  is  more  troublesome,  and  so  less  likely  to 
be  written  by  those  who  had  better  not  write  at  all. 

Couplet  verse.        The  Pindaric,  however,  was,  as  we  have  endeavoured 
to  show,  commonly  a  false  escapement  from  the  couplet  ; 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    407 

the  truer  ones  will  be  considered  in  the  next  chapter. 
In  this  we  may  content  ourselves  with  considering 
the  minor  couplet  -  work  itself — sometimes  of  poets 
already  mentioned,  sometimes  of  yet  others — which  fills 
the  forty  years  of  Dryden's  supremacy  in  it,  and  the 
ten  more  or  thereabouts  before  the  advent  of  Pope. 
Butler's  and  Prior's  heroics,  according  to  the  scheme 
adopted  here  for  all  the  more  remarkable  prosodists,  will 
go  with  their  productions  in  the  forms  more  specially 
their  own. 

The  principle  of  primogeniture,  by  which  the  whole  The  minor 
or  nearly  the  whole  of  the  property  of  a  possessor  passes  j^ 
to  a  single  representative,  has  been  regarded  as  an  unjust  satirists. 
arbitrement  of  law,  or  a  lazy  expedient  to  save  trouble. 
Yet  it  is  sometimes  the  principle  of  Nature  herself,  in 
cases  where  neither  of  these  reproaches  applies.  There 
was  no  reason  why  the  lessons  of  sixty  years,  from 
Fairfax  onwards,  should  profit  hardly  any  one  but  Dryden, 
or  should  profit  others  only  after  they  had  passed  through 
his  hands.  Yet,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  practically  was 
so.  The  minor  heroic  dramatists  have  no  doubt  been 
too  little  studied  ;  but  a  familiarity  of  a  good  many  years 
with  them  enables  me  to  say  confidently  that  nobody 
need  trouble  himself  much  about  the  management  of  the 
couplet  in  any  one  of  them  from  Crowne  to  Lee.1  So, 
again,  stress  has  sometimes  been  laid,  if  not  exactly  on 
Dryden's  obligations  to  Marvell  and  Oldham  in  satire, 
at  any  rate  on  their  priority  to  him  in  this  kind.  As 
to  the  aspect  of  this  which  concerns  manner  of  handling, 
it  is  not  ours  to  speak.  Prosodically,  it  is  safe  to  say 
that  he  learnt  nothing,  and  could  learn  nothing,  from 
them.  According  to  the  old  satiric  tradition,  they  roughen 
the  Wallerian  couplet  a  little  ;  but  that  is  all. 

These  are  not,  however,  the  couplet-poets    to  whom 
memory  generally  recurs  as  to  those  of  "  Charles's  days." 

1  Crowne's  curious  Destruction  of  Jerusalem  is  the  best  place  to  look  in 
for  this  purpose.  Lee  is  far  better  in  blank  verse  ;  in  fact,  in  his  best  single 
lines,  or  very  short  batches,  he  beats  Dryden  himself,  leaves  Otway  miles 
behind,  and  is  on  the  whole  nearer  to  Shakespeare  than  any  other  "post- 
diluvian." The  couplet  brings  out  his  tendency  to  rant. 


4o8  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

Marvell  was  a  survival,  and  Oldham  a  quickly-nipped 
precocity.  The  "  mob  of  gentlemen,"  and  (shall  we 
say?)  the  herd  of  their  led-poets,  must  be  expected  and 
need  not  be  refused. 

Roscommon..  The  respectable  Roscommon  deserves  priority,  not 
so  much  on  account  of  his  unspotted  bays  (which,  unless 
the  spotlessness  be  also  prosodic,  would  not  concern  us) 
as  because  he  was  one  of  the  oldest  of  the  group — very 
nearly  as  old  as  Dryden  himself — and  because,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  his  bays  are  unspotted  in  this  respect 
likewise,  though  Longinus  would  have  been  glad  of  him 
as  an  instance  of  the  small  satisfaction  that  faultlessness 
can  give.  If  you  take  "  smoothness  "  as  the  be-all  and 
end-all  of  the  couplet,  and  the  couplet  as  the  finest 
form  of  verse,  one  really  does  not  see  who  is  to  be 
put  above  Roscommon.  Pope  himself  can  scarcely  give 
him  points  (or  rather  can  give  him  nothing  but  poinf], 
and  is  much  more  careless  and  licentious  in  rhymes, 
though  Roscommon  doubted  rhyme,  admired  Milton,  and 
experimented  in  blanks.  In  pause  he  is  equally  im- 
peccable ;  he  isolates  the  couplet  carefully  (Dryden 
himself  is  here  quite  chaotic  and  anarchic  beside  his 
lordship).  Nor  is  he  exactly  flat :  the  famous  couplet 
about  immodest  words  is  worthy  either  of  Dryden  or  of 
Pope.  Clear  as  he  is,  you  cannot  call  him  shallow  ;  and 
though  Johnson  himself  denied  him  vigour  he  is  not  any- 
where really  feeble.  What  he  lacks  is  almost  everything, 
not  mechanical,  that  makes  poetry.  He  is  totally  uninter- 
esting. And  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  Johnson's  own  very 
lukewarm  approval  of  him  is  due  partly  to  a  secret  sense 
that  Roscommon  is  rather  an  awful  example  of  what  a 
poet  according  to  couplet  orthodoxy  would  generally  be.1 

Muigrave  Roscommon  himself  speaks  with  respect  of  Mulgrave, 

to  whom  indeed  the  Essay  on  Translated  Verse  is 
addressed  ;  and  "  sharp-judging  Adriel "  has  some  decent 

1  It  is  curious  that  Roscommon's  only  recorded  vice  was  gambling.  From 
his  verse  one  would  imagine  that  nothing  with  more  chance  in  it  than  chess 
could  have  attracted  him.  It  must  have  been  the  need  of  relief  from  the 
couplet  that  drove  him  to  the  cards. 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    409 

couplet  to  add  to  his  already-mentioned  lyrics.  If  he 
wrote  that  in  the  Essay  on  Satire  which  has  variously 
been  assigned  to  him  alone,  to  him  and  Dryden,  and  to 
Dryden  alone — 

Was  ever  prince  by  two  at  once  misled — 
False,  foolish,  old,  ill-natured,  and  ill-bred  ? 

he  touched,  at  least  this  once,  one  of  the  apices  of  the 
style.  Dryden  has  no  better  example  of  the  slap-in-the 
face  distich,  or  of  the  gesture  and  motion  of  verse  which 
it  requires.  But  it  is  fair  to  say  that  in  his  undoubted 
work — the  imitation  of  Habert's  Temple  de  la  Mort,  the 
Essay  on  Poetry,  the  curious  "  Vision  while  on  his  Tangier 
Voyage  "  (a  piece  not  unprophetic  of  Pope's  "  Unfortunate 
Lady  "  in  style  and  cadence),  and  the  semi-Pindaric  Ode 
on  Love  (it  tries  to  be  Pindaric,  but  is  always  settling 
down  towards  mere  heroics) — things  not  much  less  good 
can  be  found.  His  ear  for  rhyme,  though  not  technically 
incorrect,  must  have  been  blunt ;  for  he  has  the  same  a 
sound  in  eight  successive  lines  of  the  Temple  of  Death, 
making  in  effect  a  miniature  assonanced  tirade.  But  as 
far  as  the  mere  "  scantling  "  of  the  stopped  couplet  goes 
he  has  very  little  to  learn.  He  will  not,  or  he  cannot — 
at  any  rate  he  does  not — attain  that  "fingering"  of  it 
which  allows  Dryden  to  introduce  many  of  the  advant- 
ages of  blank  verse.  But  in  this  way  again  he  is  an 
ancestor  of  Pope's,  who  (perhaps  for  that  very  reason) 
alternately  adulated  and  lampooned  him.  On  the  whole, 
"  Adriel "  is  one  of  the  poets  whom  an  historical  study  of 
prosody  distinctly  exalts,  though  it  may  not  finally  put  him 
very  high.  To  have  almost  a  strong  reminiscence  of  the 
seventeenth-century  common  measure,  and  quite  a  strong 
anticipation  of  the  Popian  decasyllabic,  is  something. 

Dorset's    couplets    are   few  and    unimportant — rather  others, 
rough  too,  though,  as    might    be    expected,  witty ;    and 
Stepney,  who  "  made  grey  authors  blush,"  need  only  have 
made  them  reflect  how  very  easy  it  was  to  get  this  tune 
by  heart.     But  John  Pomfret  (I  once  called  him  Thomas,  Pomfret. 
and,  to  expiate  that  inexpiable,  have  bound  myself  never 


410  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

hereafter  to  mention  him  without  his  right  Christian 
name)  deserves  a  little  more  notice  here,  partly  because 
of  Johnson's  famous  assertion  about  "  The  Choice,"  and 
still  more  because  he  is  perhaps  the  capital  example 
among  minor  poets  of  the  time  of  the  oscillation — whether 
in  doubt  or  for  relief  it  is  impossible  to  say — between 
Pindaric  and  couplet 

The  piece  of  which  it  was  thought,  a  century  and  a 
quarter  ago,  by  the  person  who  had  the  best  right  to 
speak  of  any  man  living,  that  "  perhaps  no  composition 
in  English  had  been  oftener  perused,"  is  itself  couplet — 
indeed,  one  may  almost  say  that  it  could  have  been  in 
nothing  else — at  any  rate,  that  the  harmony  between 
matter  and  metre  was  evidently  pre-established.  All  but 
the  best  and  all  the  worst  characteristics  of  life  and 
literature  in  the  eighteenth  century  are  there,  just  on 
the  eve  of  the  century  itself:  good  sense  and  good 
nature  ;  rather  easy  morals  ;  a  moderate  and  conventional 
intellectuality,  and  a  sensuality  neither  coarse  nor  raffine '; 
a  certain  selfishness,  but  not  of  a  shocking  kind  ;  a  not 
too  ardent  patriotism,  and  even  a  queer  kind  of  piety, 
which  allows  itself  considerable  easements  and  licences. 
And  all  this  is  just  reflected  in  the  verse.  It  does  not 
flow  like  Denham's  great  example,  but  it  is  not  a  mere 
stagnant  ditch.  It  is  like  a  "  canal  "  of  the  period — stimu- 
lated to  mild  wavelets  by  gentle  breezes,  the  paddling  of 
water-fowl,  the  dip  of  an  oar  here  and  there,  and  the 
prospect  of  a  slight  cascade  at  the  end.  As  an  adjust- 
ment of  prosodic  means  to  (by  courtesy)  poetic  ends, 
one  must  feel  a  certain  admiration  for  it.  But  one  does 
not  want  it  again. 

There  is,  however,  nothing  else  to  be  found  in 
Pomfret's  couplet  verse  ("  Love  Triumphant  over  Reason," 
etc.),  and  when  he  tries  sterner  themes,  as  in  "  Cruelty 
and  Lust "  (a  versification  of  the  atrocity  attributed  to 
Kirke  and  to  others  before  him),  his  verse  is  quite  unequal 
to  them.  In  fact,  he  can  fall  pretty  low.  The  distich — 

Oxford  submitted  in  one  year  to  Fate, 

For  whom  her  passion  was  exceeding  great, 


CHAP,  ii     CONTEMPORARIES  OF  DRYDEN  IN  LYRIC    411 

deserves  a  place  among  the  choicest  examples  of  the 
bathos,  and  plumbs  the  prosodic  depth  as  successfully 
as  others.  The  Pindarics  of  such  a  writer  must  have 
interest,  and  they  have  accordingly  been  kept  for  this 
place.  A  mere  glance  at  their  titles — "  The  Divine 
Attributes,"  "  Eleazar's  Lamentation  over  Jerusalem," 
"A  Prospect  of  Death,"  "The  General  Conflagration," 
"  Dies  Novissima  " — does  a  tale  unfold. 

The  lightning  with  its  livid  tail 

A  train  of  glittering  terrors  draws  behind, 

is  one  of  their  own  graces.  The  man  wants  to  be 
sublime,  and  is  so  far  critically  gifted  that  he  sees  no 
chance  of  sublimity  with  his  own  form  of  couplet.  But 
what  is  the  Sublime  if  it  is  not  the  Pindaric  ?  Let  us 
be  Pindaric  and  we  shall  be  sublime.  He  is  Pindaric 
in  the  sense  which  Congreve  stigmatises  Pindaric,  as 
thus — 

Matter  produced,  had  still  a  chaos  been  : 
For  jarring  elements  engaged, 
Eternal  battles  would  have  waged, 
And  filled  with  endless  horror  the  tumultuous  scene ; 

If  Wisdom  infinite  (for  less 
Could  not  the  vast  prodigious  embryo  wield, 
Or  strength  complete  to  labouring  Nature  yield) 

Had  not,  with  actual  address, 
Composed  the  bellowing  hurry  and  established  peace. 

The  "  Prospect  of  Death "  is  rather  better  than  this : 
something  of  that  strange  "  calmed  and  calming "  effect 
which  seems  to  be  often  produced,  when  men  really  bring 
themselves  to  contemplate  the  enemy,  is  on  it  and  in  it. 
But  the  double  lesson  of  the  Pindaric  and  the  couplet  of 
this  time  has  been  almost  sufficiently  enforced. 

That  lesson  is :  first,  that  the  Pindaric,  at  least  as  we  find 
it  from  1650  to  1750,  is  essentially  an  escapement  from 
the  couplet ;  and,  secondly,  that  it  is,  for  any  automatic  or 
mechanical  effect  that  it  may  have,  an  extremely  inefficient 
escapement.  Irregularity  is  a  capital  thing  in  its  way ; 
but  mere  irregularity  for  irregularity's  sake  is,  if  not  quite 
so  monotonous  as  mere  regularity,  rather  more  tiresome 


412  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

and  considerably  more  irritating.  The  mediocre  couplet 
sinks  gently  from  the  hands,  which  fold  themselves,  it  may 
be,  to  a  blessed  sleep  ;  the  mediocre  Pindaric  provokes  them 
to  cast  it  away,  and  induces  a  wish  that  one  could  cast 
it  at  the  author.  Between  them,  when  they  are  both  bad 
enough  to  be  amusing, there  is, perhaps, not  much  choice;  but 
of  this  amusement  a  little  goes  a  long  way.  The  important 
thing  for  us  to  notice  is,  that  the  very  indefiniteness  of 
outline  in  the  Pindaric  deprives  it  of  such  almost  automatic 
virtue  as  belongs  to  the  sonnet,  to  the  greater  stanzas,  to 
the  couplet  itself,  and  to  some  extent,  as  we  shall  see 
shortly,  to  continuous  measures  like  the  octosyllable  and 
the  anapaest.  It  is  a  shape  that  shape  has  none,  except 
that  which  the  writer  has  taste  and  power  to  give  it.  If 
he  has  the  taste  and  the  power,  well  and  good  ;  but  in 
that  case  he  will  probably  write  well  in  any  metre.  If  he 
has  not,  he  will  probably  write  rather  worse  in  it  than 
in  any  other. 


CHAPTER    III 

THE    OCTOSYLLABLE    AND    THE   ANAP^ST BUTLER, 

SWIFT,    AND    PRIOR 

"  Hudibrastics  "  and  Hudibras — Their  congeniality — The  rhymes — 
Improper  use  of  the  name — Practice  of  the  metre  before  and 
after  1700 — Swift:  his  octosyllables — The  anapaest — Retrospect 
of  it — Examples  up  to  "  Mary  Ambree  " — And  "  A  Hundred 
Years  Hence  " — Remarks  on  this — Prior — His  relation  to  the 
couplet — Hisprosodic  remarks — His  Pindaric — His  "improved" 
Spenserian — His  octosyllables — His  anapaests — The  charm  of 
the  metre — Other  points  in  him — His  double  rhymes. 

WE  have  seen,  in  the  last  two  chapters,  how  the  couplet 
flourished,  greener  with  Dryden's  bays,  during  the  forty 
last  years  of  the  seventeenth  century ;  how  the  more 
delicate  and  exquisite  lyric  dwindled  under  its  shade  ; 
and  how  the  apparently  robuster  Pindaric  was  but  a — 
let  us  say  a  cabbage-stalk-staff,  against  its  tyrannous 
domination.  But  the  domination  was  not  quite  universal. 
Prosody  still  had  its  Asturias  or  its  Horeb  in  the  provinces 
of  two  other  metres  :  one  the  oldest  of  all  in  English 
properly  so  called,  the  other  an  early  derivative  of  forms 
still  older.  These  are  the  iambic  octosyllabic  couplet, 
and  the  various  combinations  of  the  anapaest 

By  one  of  those  coincidences  which  it  is  not  unreason- 
able to  regard  as  something  more,  the  five-hundred-years- 
old  metre  of  Layamon  and  the  Paternoster  received  a 
most  important  reinforcement  and  redevelopment  at  the 
very  moment  when  its  rival,  the  heroic  monarchy,  was 
finding  its  Richelieu  in  Dryden.  It  had,  we  have  said, 
never  been  abandoned  ;  and  it  had,  in  the  preceding  three- 

413 


414  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

quarters  of  a  century,  received  exquisite  illustration  from 
Shakespeare  and  Milton  themselves,  as  well  as  from 
many  lesser  men.  But  its  employments  had  been 
occasional  and  minor  ;  and  its  most  consummate  practice 
had  been  in  the  mixed  form  with  catalexis,  which  gives 
a  trochaic  alternation. 

It  was  now  to  be  made  the  vehicle  or  medium  of  a 
muc^  more  daring  enterprise — to  serve  as  the  metre  of  a 
poem  of  length  and  importance  such  as  it  had  not  known 
since  the  days  of  the  romances,  and  of  a  style  which 
recalled  nothing  in  English  except  the  extravagances  ot 
Skelton,  and  a  few  burlesques  of  romance  itself.1  And 
it  was  to  be  used  for  this  purpose  in  a  fashion,  and  on  a 
subject,  which  made  it  the  most  popular  poetical  reading 
in  English  for  years,  and  by  a  man  who  was  Dryden's 
own  equal  (though  only  on  one  of  the  many  sides  ot 
Dryden's  genius)  in  satiric  power,  his  superior  in  learning, 
and  the  equal,  if  not  the  superior,  of  almost  any  poet  in 
a  certain  narrow  and  eccentric  but  most  vigorous  idiosyn- 
crasy. Dryden  (il  ttait  orfevre)  wished  that  Butler  had 
written  Hudibras  in  heroics.  It  is  improbable  that  he 
could  know  the  fact  that  Butler  had,  most  characteristic- 
ally, written  the  quite  homogeneous  Elephant  in  the  Moon 
(a  satire  on  the  Royal  Society,  to  which  Dryden  himself 
belonged)  both  in  "  short "  and  "  long "  verse,  as  he 
himself  calls  the  latter.  I  say  characteristically,  because 
the  proceeding  shows  at  once  the  shrewd,  practical,  almost 
scientific  temper  of  the  man,  and  his  curious  sardonic 
attitude.  For  the  very  process  is  a  kind  of  "  covered 
way,"  as  we  shall  show  later,  to  attack  the  weaknesses 
of  the  heroic,  and  its  liability  to  clicht  and  stuffing.  But 
this  comparison  is  decisive  as  to  the  poet's  wisdom  in 
selecting  the  shorter  form  for  his  longer  poem.  If  he 
had  wished  to  attack  the  earlier  Roundheads  as  Dryden 

1  The  question  of  the  exact  relation  of  the  "  Hudibrastics  before  Hudi- 
bras" of  Sir  John  Mennis  and  Dr.  Smith  in  Musarum  Delicia?  (1656)  and 
Wit  Restored  (1658)  to  Hitdibras  itself  is,  in  the  old  sense,  a  "nice"  one. 
But  it  is  hardly  one  on  which  we  can  enter  here.  There  are  worse  subjects, 
among  those  waiting  for  separate  treatment,  than  the  progress  of  burlesque 
verse  from  Skelton  to  Butler. 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  415 

himself  attacked  the  later  Whigs — satirically  indeed,  but 
with  satire  of  an  argumentative  turn  :  to  convince  as  well 
as  to  persuade,  to  overthrow  as  well  as  to  ridicule — the 
heroic  would  have  been  his  weapon.1  But  in  his  case  the 
conviction  and  the  overthrow  were  accomplished  :  he 
simply  had  to  keep  the  vanquished  enemy  "  on  the  run  " 
with  an  avenging  swarm  of  light  troops,  to  sprinkle  them, 
after  their  reprobation,  with  a  fiery  rain  of  endless  sarcasm. 
For  this  the  nimbleness  of  the  octosyllable,  its  natural 
skip  and  flutter  as  compared  with  the  stride  and  sweep 
of  the  couplet,  were  essentially  suited.  And  Butler  knew 
exactly  how  to  manage  this  skip  and  flutter  :  how  to  let 
it  drop  now  and  then  into  a  sly  gentle  run,  and  how  to 
wake  it  up  with  a  perfect  pirouette  of  some  astounding 
rhyme,  which  enables  him  to  plunge  upon  the  foe  and 
stick  poisoned  banderillas  in  his  hide. 

People  complain  that  Hudibras  is  difficult  to  read  Their 
now ;  and  perhaps  it  is,  for  in  order  to  appreciate  it  conseniallty- 
thoroughly  a  great  deal  of  literary  and  historical  know- 
ledge is  wanted.  Men  have  forgotten  what  the  petty 
and  irresistible  tyranny  and  spite  of  a  gang  of  trium- 
phant Nonconformists — without  letters,  the  sworn  foes 
of  art,  hypocritical,  morose,  pedantic  in  spite  of  their 
illiteracy — must  have  been,  and  was.  But  anybody 
who  can  take  the  prosodic  point  of  view,  and  who  will 
give  himself  the  very  slight  trouble  required  to  understand 
Butler's  object  and  plan  of  attack,  will  be  rather  sorry  than 
glad  when  he  comes  to  the  end  of  "  The  Lady's  Answer." 
He  will  most  assuredly  mix  no  sorrow  with  the  gladness 
of  his  appreciation  of  the  thing  as  a  work  of  art,  and  feel 
no  grudge  at  the  time  spent  upon  it.  In  fact,  the  only 
fault  to  be  found  with  the  poem,  from  our  point  of  view, 
is  the  difficulty — in  fact,  the  impossibility — of  properly 
illustrating  its  prosodic  character.  In  one  sense,  no  doubt, 
almost  any  passage  is  a  fair  sample  ;  but  in  another  no 
single  passage  is  a  fair  sample  at  all.  Nothing  but  the 
whole,  or  an  extract  altogether  beyond  our  means,  can 

1  Nor  must  I  be  understood  for  a  moment  as  meaning  that  he  was  not 
master  enough  of  it.      He  has  left  examples  that  are  quite  competent. 


416  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

shew  its  variety  in  monotony,  its  endless  fertility  in 
metrical  as  in  other  resource,  the  way  in  which  the 
conjurer's  "  bag  of  tricks "  is  absolutely  inexhaustible  in 
playing  with  this  little  handful  of  sixteen  syllables  normal. 
The  rhymes.  So  also,  though  not  quite  to  the  same  extent,  the 
famous  eccentricity  of  the  rhymes  is  very  difficult  to 
illustrate,  and  impossible  to  generalise.  Such  well-known 
things  as  "  philosopher  "  and  "  Alexander  Ross  over,"  such 
less-known  and  more  audacious  ones  as  "  benignly "  and 
"  pigsney,"  in  hypercatalectic  lines — the  latter  looking  like 
a  survival  or  revival  of  the  old  Wyatt  licence  of  rhyming 
on  the  redundant  syllable — throw  light  only  on  themselves, 
and  the  actual  places  where  they  occur ;  not  on  each 
other,  or  on  the  general  system.  In  fact,  that  system  may 
be  said  to  be  one  of  perpetual  "  surprise  rhymes  " — of 
making  the  terminal  curvet  contrast  with  the  steady  roll 
of  the  line  itself.  For  this  purpose,  evidently,  a  bad 
rhyme  is  as  useful  as  a  good,  and  rather  more  so,  provided 
only  that  the  author  be  not  suspected  of  making  it  by 
mistake — a  suspicion  which  will  rarely  attach  to  Butler. 
Indeed,  it  is  one  of  his  not  very  recondite  but  admirably 
managed  devices  to  amble  along  peacefully  for  quite  a 
period  of  couplets,  regularly  flowing  and  nicely  "  poppling  " 
with  decently  resonant  jingle  and  nothing  more,  before 
and  after  he  plunges  down  one  of  his  cascades,  or  spouts 
up  one  of  his  geysers  of  extravagant  rhyme. 

improper  use  It  is  scarcely  to  be  wondered  at  that  the  extraordinary 
f  the  name.  cieverness  of  Hudibrcis,  its  wide  popularity,  and  the  way 
in  which,  when  that  popularity  ceased  as  regards  actual 
reading,  it  took  its  place  as  an  acknowledged  classic, 
should  have  caused  even  an  illegitimate  association  between 
it  and  the  metre  of  which,  after  all,  it  made  something 
like  a  catachresis.  "  Hudibrastics "  became,  however 
improperly,  almost  as  recognised  a  title  for  the  octo- 
syllable as  "  Skeltonics  "  had  properly  become  for  the  short 
doggerel ;  and  even  so  late  as  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  we  find  demurs  to  the  use  of  them  in 
serious  poetry,  when  they  were  taken  up  by  Scott. 

But  this  was  not  of  the  slightest  importance.     What 


CHAP,  in       •  OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  417 

was  of  much,  was  that  by  this  popularity,  this  merit,  this  Practice  of  the 
established  classical  position  of  Hudibras,  the  octosyllable 
was  at  once  appanaged,  and  entrenched  in  its  appanage,  1700. 
against  the  tyranny  of  the  heroic.  It  became,  as  it  were, 
a  Rochelle  or  a  Sedan  for  prosodic  independence,  and  one 
out  of  which  the  independents  never  allowed  themselves 
to  be  either  cajoled  or  coerced.  For  some  time,  indeed,  it 
was  not  much  practised  :  its  rival  was  the  newer  mistress. 
Dryden,  as  we  have  said,  has  it  once  or  twice  in  different 
forms,  and  showed  his  usual  mastery  in  it ;  but  it  was 
not  his  doxy.  Rochester  and  his  fellows  tried  it  a  little, 
and  when  they  did,  chiefly  in  the  older  half-trochaic  form 
of  Wither.  Aphra  uses  it  in  The  Lady's  Watch^  but 
merely  as  an  alternative — in  fact,  as  one  among  dozens  of 
other  measures  ;  and  the  eclectic  Walsh  turns  out  a  copy 
of  verses  in  it  with  his  usual  skill.  That  curious  poetaster 
King  (not  to  be  confounded  with  his  cleverer  but  more 
ill-conditioned  namesake  in  the  next  generation,  the 
Jacobite  and  renegade  Principal  of  St.  Mary  Hall)  used  it 
for  his  Art  of  Cookery  not  at  all ;  but  alternated  it  with 
heroics  for  his  Art  of  Love \  trying  it  also  in  several  other 
poems,  one  of  which,  "  Orpheus  and  Eurydice,"  furnishes  a 
passage  which  used  to  be  familiar  in  the  older  Speakers 
and  extract-books.2  One  might  bring  in  Congreve  and 
even  Parnell  here ;  but  both  probably  owed  additional 
stimulus,  besides  that  received  from  Butler,  to  two  great 
writers — who  are  thought  of  commonly  as  eighteenth- 
century,  but  who  belonged  for  nearly  half  the  life  of  one 
and  for  two-thirds  of  that  of  the  other  to  the  seventeenth 
— Swift  and  Prior.  Availing  ourselves  of  the  usual  licence, 
we  may  take  Swift  first  with  such  of  his  versification  as 
has  not  yet  been  noticed.  Prior  is  of  such  importance  in 
this  History  that  we  may  take,  not  only  his  octosyllables 
and  his  pre-eminent  contribution  to  the  other  "  escapement," 

1  In  this  metre  is  the  agreeable  passage  which  Mrs.  Blake  pitched  upon, 
"told  by  a  spirit,"  in  Bysshe  (v.  inf.,  and  Mr.  Swinburne's  Blake,  p.  130 — a 
passage  by  which,  forty  years  ago,  Mr.  Swinburne  was  my  introducer  both  to 
Aphra's  work  and  to  Bysshe's  name). 

2  A  roasted  ant  that's  nicely  done 
By  one  small  atom  of  the  sun,  etc. 

VOL.  II  2  E 


418  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  .       BOOKVII 

the  anapaest,  but  all  his  rhyme  together  at  the  end  of  the 
chapter,  with  some  account  of  the  previous  history  of  this 
anapaest  between. 

Swift:  his  The  importance  of  Swift  himself  is  indeed  very  great 

octosyllables.  from  the  point  of  view  which  we  are  chiefly  taking  in  this 
chapter.  His  Pindarics  are  almost  negligible,  except  by 
the  historian  (by  whom  they  have  not  been  neglected),  and 
they  are  merely  glances  of  the  backward  face.  But  his 
octosyllables  are  very  noteworthy.  With  less  grotesque 
and  more  polish  than  Butler's,  they  have  at  least  equal 
diable  au  corps,  and  they  actually  presented  themselves  as 
examples  of  light  but  not  burlesque  versification  to 
"  Spleen  "  Green  and  many  others.  For  pure  narrative, 
neither  directly  comic  nor  directly  romantic,  he  made  them, 
as  in  Cadenus  and  Vanessa,  an  admirable  vehicle  ;  and  if 
(of  which  I  myself  have  never  had  the  least  doubt)  he 
really  wrote  the  lines  about  the 

Offending  race  of  human  kind, 

the  preservation  of  which  we  owe  to  Chesterfield,  he  made 
this  Tartar  bow  of  a  weapon  into  a  catapult  of  the  most 
appalling  force  and  range.  Just  as  the  Caroline  common 
measure  shows  to  the  utmost  how  deft  manipulation  of 
word -sound  can  give  charm  and  witchery,  so  do  these 
octosyllables  show  how  the  same  manipulation  can  express 
contempt — annihilating,  or  too  contemptuous  even  to  care 
to  annihilate. 

He  could,  however,  write  Butler  a  little  modernised 
when  he  chose,  as,  for  instance,  when  he  horrified  Dr. 
Guest  with  "  Aristophanes  "  and  "  profane  is,"  or  Hiberni- 
cally  dared  "  Ganymede  "  and  "  any  maid."  And  his  pure 
doggerel,  as  in  the  immortal  "  Mrs.  Harris's  Petition," 
shows  a  quite  admirable  ear,  as  in  fact  do  all  his  odds  and 
ends  of  verse  with  their  wild  rhymes  and  fantastic  break- 
downs of  cadence.1  It  may  be  that  he  never  was  exactly 
a  poet,  Pindaric  or  other.  But  he  was  no  mean  versifier, 

1  "  O'Rourke's  noble  fare,"  is  but  one  instance  among  many  that  could  be 
given. 


CHAP,  in  OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  419 

and  it  is  curious  that  nearly  all  his  verse  ranges  itself 
among  the  escapes  from  the  heroic  couplet. 

Swift  tried  the  pure,  non-doggerellised  anapaest  not  The  anapaest, 
very  infrequently  ;  but  it  was  not  a  measure  likely  to  be 
at  its  most  perfect  with  him  either  in  its  playful  or  its 
passionate  modulation.  It  was,  however,  at  this  time  that 
it  came  forward  as  an  "  above-stairs "  metre,  and,  as 
fashioned  by  Prior  chiefly,  took,  with  the  octosyllable  as 
fashioned  after  Butler  by  Prior  and  Swift  himself,  a 
definite  position,  if  not  exactly  against  the  couplet — for 
the  metaphors  of  hostility  are  merely  metaphors — at  any 
rate  as  an  ally  and  exponent  of  moods  different  from  those 
which  find  their  sufficient  expression  in  the  couplet  itself. 

It  was,  of  course,  no  new  thing,  though  its  continuity  Retrospect 
from  very  early  times  has  perhaps  never  yet  been  °  lt- 
vindicated  till  now,  and  though  some  critics  and  historians 
have  laid  rather  undue  stress  on  its  non-appearance  in 
"  literate "  poetry  during  the  Elizabethan  period.  The 
anapaestic  foot,  or,  if  not  definitely  that,  a  sporadic 
suggestion  of  anapaestic  rhythm,  may  appear  in  Anglo- 
Saxon — though  to  my  ear  it  is  almost  always  merged  in  the 
trochee.  But,  as  we  have  shown  in  the  preceding  volume, 
it  appears  as  a  substitute  and  equivalent  from  the  very 
dawn  of  Middle  English  poetry  ;  while  as  a  dominant  it 
is  more  or  less  distinct  in  the  Lewes  poem,  in  the 
rhythms  of 

My  tru|est  trea  sure  so  traijtorly  tajken 
and 

Alas  |  that  ejver  the  speech  |  was  spo|ken, 

with  others.  It  replaces  the  trochee  as  the  "ground 
swell,"  the  underlying  rhythmic  character,  of  the  revived 
alliterative  verse :  and  in  the  doggerel  that  comes  from  the 
clash  of  this  and  the  broken-down  decasyllabic  of  the 
fifteenth  century  it  is  one  of  the  most  prominent  features, 
and  even  forms.  Nor  at  last  in  Tusser  is  there  any  more 
doubt  about  it :  it  has  as  much  method,  if  as  little  music, 
as  any  metre  that  ever  was  metred. 


420  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

Despite,  however,  this  long  sap  and  definite  lodgment 
at  last ;  despite  the  attraction  of  the  rhythm  for  the 
natural  man  ;  despite  the  help  given  by  triple -time 
accompaniments  in  the  music  which  was  so  universally 
cultivated, — it  is  undeniable  that  pure  anapaestic  measures 
— nay,  pure  or  basic  trisyllabic  measures  of  any  kind — are 
not  prominent,  and  are  even  strangely  latent,  in  Elizabethan 
literature.1  My  own  explanation  of  the  fact  is,  in  the 
main — though  it  may  seem  too  "  metaphysical "  to  some, 
— that  unconscious  horror  of  a  relapse  into  doggerel  which 
I  have  urged  before.  But  I  should  lay  much  stress,  as  a 
secondary  cause,  on  the  working  of  this  horror  in  the 
great  pastors  and  masters  of  the  poetry  of  1580-1650. 
Although  Spenser  did  nothing  more  epoch-making  than 
his  trial  of  the  anapaestic  admixture  in  The  Shepherd's 
Kalendar,  nothing  is  clearer — indeed,  his  very  abandonment 
of  the  path  he  had  opened  proves  it — than  that  he  did 
not  care  for  quick,  dancing,  galloping  rhythm.  We  know 
that  Jonson  thought  the  heroic  the  crown  of  prosody. 
As  for  Donne,  if  he  had  thought  about  the  matter  at  all, 
it  is  probable  that  he  would  have  thought  both  the 
regularity  and  the  celerity  of  the  anaepaest  canter  rather 
common  and  popular.  At  any  rate,  this  class  of  measure 
is  mostly  wanting  except  in  pure  songs,  and  present 
rather  seldom  in  proportion  even  there. 

But  two  words  which  have  just  been  used  give  the  key 
of  the  fact,  that  if  it  was  seldom  admitted  above  stairs  it 
was  constantly  in  evidence  below.  It  was  "  common  and 
popular,"  and  the  commons  and  the  populace  took  good  care 
that  it  should  not  die.  Most  people  know  that  despite 
all  the  pains  that  have  been  spent  upon  the  ballad-poetry 
of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  there  is,  in 

1  Humphrey  Gifford  has  had  for  a  century  and  more,  and  certainly  shall 
not  lose  through  any  tactics  of  mine,  an  honourable  position  for  his  "  Some- 
thing made  of  Nothing  at  a  Gentlewoman's  request  "  (Posie  of  Gilloflowers,  ed. 
Grosart,  1875),  published  as  early  as  1580 — 

Ye  gladly  would  have  me  to  make  you  some  toy, 
And  yet  will  not  tell  me  whereof  I  should  write,  etc. 

And  I  have  given  examples  from  the  song-books.  But  the  text  is  true- 
on  the  whole. 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  421 

nearly  all  cases,  insurmountable  difficulty  in  settling  its  exact 
dates.  The  obvious  impossibility  of  deciding  how  long  a 
ballad  was  composed  before  it  appeared  in  print  at  all ; 
the  perishableness  and  the  undatedness  of  broadsides  ;  the 
bewildering  promiscuity  and  cross-inclusions  of  collections, 
Garlands, Drolleries,  and  the  like, — make  dogmatism, except 
of  the  rashest  and  most  worthless  kind,  impossible  save 
in  a  very  few  cases.  Moreover,  there  is  the  extremely 
interesting  and  important  fact  that,  in  many  early 
examples,  owing  to  the  presence  of  that  equivalence 
which  has  been  so  fully  exhibited  and  discussed  in  the 
preceding  volume,  it  is  difficult  to  say  off-hand  whether 
the  basis  is  really  iambic  or  anapaestic.  The  Nut-Browne  Examples  up 
Mayde  herself,  though  the  enormous  majority  of  the  actual 
feet  are  iambs,  has  a  distinct  tendency  towards  anapaestic 
rhythm  :  I  have  even  known  people  who  were  under  the 
impression  that  both  it  and  Chevy  Chase  belong  to  the 
anapaestic  brigade.  But  when  we  get  into  the  region  of 
known  tunes,  "  Deny  Down,"  "  Packington's  Pound,"  etc., 
there  is  no  further  doubt  of  the  anapaestic  basis,  though 
the  prosodic  construction  on  it  is  often  very  ramshackle. 
If  "  Tie  the  Mare,  Tom  boy "  is  really  of  Henry  the 
Eighth's  time  or  even  of  Mary's,  there  is  no  doubt  of  the 
measure  being  securely  established  by  then,  which,  be  it 
remembered,  was  little,  if  at  all,  before  Tusser.  If  we 
could  be  certain  of  the  date  of  "  The  King  and  the 
Miller  of  Mansfield  "  we  should  know  when  the  anapaestic 
suggestion  and  substitution  which  is  observable  in  the 
earlier  versions  of  the  story,  as  far  back  as  "  John  the  Reeve," 
settled  into  a  definite  anapaestic  measure.  But  it  would 
be  altogether  unreasonable  scepticism  to  doubt  that 
"  Mary  Ambree "  was  composed  immediately  or  very 
shortly  after  the  date  of  the  events  it  mentions — that  is  to 
say,  1584.  And  allowing  for  the  roughness  of  the  print- 
ing, "  Mary  Ambree,"  if  not  excessively  poetical,  is  as  good 
cantering  rhythm  as  a  body  can  want  for  working  days.1 

1  In  Scotland,  Montgomerie's  "  Hay  !  now  the  day  dawis  "  (v.  sup.  vol.  i. 
p.  285),  gives  contemporary  evidence  of  well-settled  anapcestics,  themselves, 
no  doubt,  not  new  things. 


422  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

And  At  any  rate,  from  that  time,  or  about  that  time,  onward, 

"  A  Hundred _  fliere  is  no  doubt   that   these  measures    have  taken  the 

Years  Hence. 

popular  ear ;  and  we  find  them,  not  indeed  to  any 
great  extent  in  the  choicer  and  more  aristocratic  song- 
books  (which  we  have  examined  already)  of  the  earliest 
years  of  the  seventeenth  century,  but  in  all  their  more 
miscellaneous  successors  of  the  miscellany  kind  up  to 
D'Urfey's  famous  Pills  to  Purge  Melancholy.  Very  many 
of  the  contents  of  this  book,  though  they  did  not  appear 
till  1719,  date  much  earlier.  How  many  readers,  half 
amused  with  the  gaiety  and  variety  of  D'Urfey's  collections, 
half  disgusted  with  their  roughness  and  ribaldry,  have 
stumbled  with  delight,  as  I  remember  doing  long  ago,  on 
the  charming,  if  not  uniformly  charming  verses  to  which 
Mr.  Swinburne,  I  think,  with  his  unfailing  instinct,  has 
been  the  chief  critic  to  do  express  justice  ? *  They  begin 
well  enough — 

Let  us  drink  and  be  merry,  sing,  dance,  and  rejoice, 

With  claret  and  sherry,  theorbo  and  voice. 

The  changeable  world  to  our  joys  is  unjust, 

All  treasure's  uncertain,  then  down  with  your  dust ! 

On  frolics  dispose  your  pounds,  shillings,  and  pence, 

For  we  shall  be  nothing  a  hundred  years  hence. 

There  is  no  grating  on  the  axle-tree  of  dry  wheels,  still 
less  any  dropping  off  of  the  wheel  itself  and  dragging  of 
the  whole  chariot,  as  we  so  often  find  earlier.  But  the 
third  stanza  is  the  triumph — 

The  most  beautiful  bit,  that  hath  all  eyes  upon  her, 

That  her  honesty  sells  for  a  hogo  of  honour — 

Whose  lightness  and  brightness  doth  shine  with  such  splendour 

That  none  but  the  stars  are  thought  fit  to  attend  her — 

Though  now  she  be  pleasant  and  sweet  to  the  sense, 

Will  be  damnable  mouldy  a  hundred  years  hence  ! 

1  But  let  poor  "Captain  Shandon"  have  his  due.  Maginn  had  written  a 
glorious  Tory  ballad  on  the  theme  long  before,  starting  with  the  actual  first 
lines  and  going  on — 

So  sings  the  old  song,  and  a  good  one  it  is  ; 
Few  better  were  written  from  that  day  to  this. 

(Mr.  Montagu's  Miscellanies  of  Maginn,  2  vols.,  London,  1885,  vol.  i.  "pp.  34 
et  sey. ) 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  423 

Of  course,  the  middle  couplet  here  is  sheer  poetry —  Remarks  on 
something  transcending  mere  prosody.  But  what  you  l  1S' 
transcend,  once  more,  you  must  use  as  a  means  and  stage 
in  the  transcension  or  trans-scansion  ;  and  the  prosody 
helps  the  poetry  mightily  here,  as  everywhere.  Observe 
how  even  in  the  first  stanza,  but  still  more  in  the  second 
and  noted,  the  progress  is  like  the  easiest  and  most 
graceful  hand-over-hand  swimming :  the  singer  pulls  him- 
self up  the  ladder  of  song  with  the  confident,  effortless 
quiver  of  each  successive  foot-beat.  Observe  the  immense 
advantage  obtained  from  the  redundant  endings  and  the 
double  rhymes  ;  not  universally  used,  but  occasionally,  as 
a  sort  of  launch-out  in  the  progress  with  an  echoing 
extension  to  the  sound.  It  is  impossible  to  conceive 
anything  better  suited  as  rest,  as  refreshment,  as  alterative, 
after  the  vigorous  insucculence  of  the  couplet  even  at  its 
best,  than  this  abounding  torrent  of  various  melody. 

Dryden,  as  we  have  seen,  had  perfectly  well  known 
where  to  find  the  springs  of  it ;  but,  once  more,  it  was 
not  these  springs  of  which  he  was  the  high  priest  or  head 
dispenser.  Nearly  twenty  years  before  D'Urfey  published 
his  Pills,  though  perhaps  as  much  after  these  verses  were 
written,  Bysshe  had,  as  we  shall  see  in  the  next  Book, 
made  a  kind  of  prosodic  rogue  and  vagabond  of  the 
anapaest,  which  he  would  not  name  or  admit  to  be 
an  anapaest  at  all.  But  perhaps  after  they  were  written, 
perhaps  not,  the  measure  had  been  taken  up  by  a  poet 
who  died  a  year  or  two  after  the  Pills  appeared,  and  who 
had  made  himself  one  of  the  most  popular  of  his  time,  while 
he  also  possessed  scholarship  and  social  and  political 
position.  Almost  the  founder,  according  to  current 
literary  tradition,  of  the  department  of  "  verse  of  society  " 
in  English  poetry  as  to  tone  and  matter,  he  was  in  many 
ways  remarkable  as  a  mere  prosodist,  though  perhaps  few 
under  this  description  would  recognise,  as  all  would  under 
the  former,  the  person  of  Matthew  Prior. 

Prior1    is   a    remarkable    illustration   of  a  subject  on  Prior. 

1  The  new  edition  of  his  poems  by  Mr.  Waller  (2  vols.,  Cambridge,  1905-7) 


424  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

which,  from  certain  indications,  he  would  have  written 
very  well,  the  ingratitude  of  mankind.  Because  he  was 
a  diplomatist  (and  apparently  no  bad  one)  they  have 
decided  that  he  was  not  a  poet,  or  at  any  rate  not  a  great 
poet.  Because  he  amused  them,  they  have,  sometimes  at 
any  rate,  decided  that  he  could  not  do  anything  else. 
But  this  is  to  a  great  extent  non  nostrum,  as  still  more 
are  his  unfortunate  deficiency  in  personal  and  political 
heroism,  his  alleged  proneness  to  low  company  and  the 
worship  of  Venus  Pandemos,  and  other  things.  Not  so 
his  prosodic  position,  which  is,  if  the  present  writer  has 
not  deceived  himself  for  a  good  many  years,  that  of  a 
definite  though  no  doubt  half-unconscious  rebel  against 
the  heroic  couplet.  In  fact,  it  was — again  if  I  do  not 
mistake — this  taint  of  sedition  in  him  which  was  at  the 
root  of  Johnson's  very  damaging  but  very  unfair  criticism. 
For  a  universally  known  saying  of  the  Doctor's  about 
Paulo  Purganti  shows  that  his  objection  was  not  moral. 
His  relations  But,  it  will  be  said,  he  wrote  heroics.  He  did  ;  and  it 
'  would  be  very  odd  if  he  had  not  written  them.  Solomon^ 
which  he  thought  his  masterpiece,  and  the  world  (accord- 
ing to  the  world's  unkind  habit)  did  not,  is  in  couplets. 
It  is  ;  and  there  are  some  fine  ones  in  it.  But,  again,  he 
could  hardly  have  done  otherwise,  hoping,  as  he  did,  to 
make  the  public  take  it  for  a  masterpiece.  Moreover,  the 
Preface  of  this  very  poem  contains  a  distinct  expression 
of  discontent  with  the  form.  He  wrote  others.  Again  he 
did.  But  his  ordinary  couplets  are,  as  heroic  couplets,  very 
ordinary  ;  nor  can  much  more  be  said  of  any  of  his  pieces 
in  the  metre.  It  is  when  he  is  free  from  it  that  he  curvets, 
that  he  expatiates,  that  he  displays  the  "careful  and 
perspicuous  art "  which  Mr.  Dobson  so  justly  ascribes  to 
him,  the  "  charming  humour  of  lyric "  that  had  been 
earlier  awarded  him  by  Thackeray  ;  above  all,  that  power 

has  added  much  to  our  knowledge  of  him.  Prosodically,  however,  we  need 
only  draw  attention,  among  the  new  matter,  to  the  charming  anapaestic  triplets 
of  "Jinny  the  Just"  and  to  certain  very  terrible  "blanks"  which  he  never 
published,  and  which  shall  therefore  be  reserved  to  the  next  Book,  with  their 
more  carefully  finished  kin,  his  translations  of  Callimachus. 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  425 

"  of  making  verse  speak  the  language  of  prose  without 
being  prosaic,  of  marshalling  words  without  seeming  to 
displace  a  syllable  for  the  sake  of  rhyme  or  rhythm,"  the 
ascription  of  which  is  one  of  the  highest  proofs  of  Cowper's 
gifts  as  a  critic. 

It  may  perhaps  be  permitted  to  insist  a  little  on  the  His  prosodic 
remarkable  evidence  of  conscious  interest  in  different remarks- 
prosodic  forms  displayed  by  Prior.  It  is  well  known  that 
this  is  by  no  means  the  rule  with  poets — some  of  whom 
seem  even  a  little  to  resent  the  idea  that  they  do  not  sing 
otherwise  than  as  they  must.  And  those  who  have  read 
this  book  with  any  attention  will  know  that  it  has  (except 
in  the  earliest  time)  seldom  been  less  the  rule  than  at  the 
time  with  which  we  are  dealing.  Milton  has  left  no 
theory  but  the  outburst  at  the  beginning  of  Paradise  Lost, 
and  the  enigmatic  allusions  in  the  sonnets.  Dryden  tells 
us  that  he  was  going  to  write  about  prosody  ;  but  never 
seems  to  have  done  it.  Hardly  anything,  indeed  for  a 
century  before  Prior,  since  Drayton's  remarks  on  the  vari- 
ous epic  stanzas,  corresponds  to  Prior's  own  observations  in 
the  Preface  to  Solomon,  and  those  in  that  to  the  Ode  to  the 
Queen.  That  the  experiment  announced  in  the  latter, 
and  carried  out  in  the  Ode  itself  (v.  inf.},  is  disastrous,  is 
of  much  less  importance  than  that  it  is  an  experiment 
The  Solomon  passage,  which,  I  feel  sure,  excited  Johnson's 
hostility,  is  of  too  great  moment  not  to  be  given,  as  far  as 
its  more  important  utterances  go.1 

The  validity  and  general  drift  of  Prior's  censure  will  His  Pindaric. 
be  illustrated  later :  the  point  for  us  here  is  that  it  shows 
in  its  author  a  very  considerable  sense  of  the  importance 
of  prosody,  and  especially  a  sense  of  discontent  and  a 
desire  to  explore.     Remembering  this,  let  us  examine  his 

1  "  Heroic  with  continued  rhyme,  as  Donne  and  his  contemporaries  used  it, 
carrying  the  sense  of  one  verse  most  commonly  into  another,  was  found  too 
dissolute  and  wild,  and  came  very  often  too  near  prose.  As  Davenant  and 
Waller  directed  and  Dryden  perfected  it,  it  is  too  confined.  It  cuts  off  the 
sense  .  .  .  produces  too  frequent  severity  in  the  sound.  ...  It  is  too 
broken  and  weak.  ...  It  loses  the  writer  when  he  composes,  [and]  must  do 
the  same  to  the  reader."  He  " dare  not  determine,"  but  is  "only  inquiring," 
whether  blank  verse  and  stanza  be  "a  proper  remedy  for  [his]  poetical 
complaint." 


426  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

practice.  The  exact  order  of  his  work  is  not  always  easy 
to  determine,  for,  busy  as  he  was  in  another  service  from 
that  of  the  Muse,  he  published  no  collection  of  his  work 
for  some  twenty  years  after  he  began  to  write.  But  this 
matters  little.  He  seems  to  have  begun,  as  it  was  almost 
certain  that  a  man  of  his  date  would  begin,  with  couplets 
and  Pindaric.  It  is  to  the  latter  that  Mr.  Dobson  has 
laid  the  just  and  great  compliment  above  quoted.  But, 
as  that  admirable  metrist  himself  would  be  the  first  to 
admit  in  cross-examination,  you  want,  in  poetic  art, 
something  more  than  carefulness  and  perspicuity,  though 
these  qualities  will  give  you  all  but  the  very  best  prose. 
And  it  is  one  of  the  dangers  of  the  Pindaric  that  when  it 
escapes  bombast  or  unkemptness,  and  does  not  attain 
sublimity,  its  resemblance  to  fine  prose  is  apt  to  appear  in 
a  damaging  fashion.  That  Prior  fully  saw  this  may  or 
may  not  be  the  case  ;  that  he  felt  it,  his  subsequent  history 
shows.  He  did  not  abandon  Pindaric  entirely :  in  that 
age  he  could  hardly  do  so  ;  it  was  then,  if  not  your  only 
wear,  your  wear  occasionally  by  obligation,  like  canons^  or 
a  silk  hat,  in  other  ages.  But  it  was  evidently  not  his 
choice,  and  on  perhaps  the  most  distinguished  occasion 
on  which  he  might  have  used  it  he  actually  substituted 
his  unlucky  but  not  uninteresting  experiment  with  the 
Spenserian. 

His  Whether    he    knew   the   alterations   which   Giles   and 

••improved    phmeas  Fletcher  had  already  made  in  this  stanza  cannot, 

Spenserian.  _  * 

of  course,  be  positively  stated.  It  is  not  impossible  ;  for 
The  Purple  Island  appeared  only  some  thirty  years  before 
his  own  birth,  and  the  work  of  Cambridge  poets  has 
always  been  rather  carefully  cherished  by  tradition  in 
their  University.  If  he  did,  he  should  have  taken  warning 
by  them  "  not  to  move  Camarina."  As  a  matter  of  fact 
he  is  less  successful  than  either.  His  proceeding  is  to 
add  a  line,  making  the  stanza  a  dixain,  to  remove  the 
picking  up  of  the  b  rhyme  at  the  fifth,  and,  retaining  the 
final  Alexandrine,  to  make  the  rhyme-scheme  ababcdcdee. 
By  this  egregious  device  he  gets  indeed  that  "  regularity  " 
to  which  his  age  sacrificed  everything  ;  for  instead  of  the 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  427 

in-and-out  structure  of  the  original  you  have  simply  two 
quatrains  and  a  couplet,  the  extra  length  of  the  tenth  line 
being  the  only  instance  in  which  everything  is  not  exactly 
matched  and  batched.  But,  ipso  facto  and  inevitably,  he 
loses  the  unique  and  miraculous  cohesion  of  the  stanza,  and 
the  charm  of  linked  sweetness  by  which  that  cohesion  is 
at  once  accompanied  and  accomplished.  In  fact,  the 
attentive  and  fairly  accustomed  ear  is  cheated  into  the 
expectation  of  a  sequence  of  Gondibert  or  Annus  Mirabilis 
quatrains,  and  then  shocked  by  the  intrusion  of  a  bandy- 
legged couplet  in  the  procession.  However,  as  has  been  said, 
there  is  large  licence  and  plentiful  pardon  for  experiment. 
Prior  made  no  other  false  step  in  this  direction  :  in  fact, 
to  use  his  own  words  elsewhere  and  on  another  subject — 

Matthew  thought  better,  for  Matthew  thought  right 

to  take  up,  instead,  the  octosyllable  (which  had  been 
brought  into  fashion  again  by  Butler),  the  anapaest  (which, 
as  we  have  just  shown,  had  been  working  its  way  up  in 
the  social-prosodic  scale),  with  common  and  other  lyrical 
measures,  and  to  treat  them  in  his  own  way  as  escapements 
and  expatiations  from  the  couplet.  This  he  still  practised 
in  translations,  in  satiric  styles,  in  the  usual  "  balaam  "  of 
epilogues,  etc.,  and  (oddity  number  two-!)  in  the  rehandling 
(which  reads  to  us  most  like  designed  burlesque)  of  the 
Nut-Brown  Maid. 

To  attempt  to  distinguish  exactly  between  Swift's  His 
handling  of  the  octosyllable  and  Prior's  would  partake  of  octosyllables- 
the  nature  of  hair-splitting.  Both  start  directly  from 
Butler.  But  between  them  and  their  original  there  is,  in 
the  first  place,  that  remarkable  though  indefinable  change 
of  modern  for  not  modern  English  to  which  attention 
must  be  often  drawn  ;  for  though  Hudibras  was  published 
after  the  Restoration  it  is  wholly  retrospective  in  tone. 
In  the  second,  there  is  a  corresponding  alteration  of 
manners  ;  and  in  Prior's  case,  if  not  in  Swift's,  a  consider- 
able softening  of  temper.  Where  Butler  makes  us  think 
— to  take  the  companion  literature — of  the  Satire  Mtnippte 
and  even  of  Rabelais,  they  make  us  think  of  Moliere  and 


428  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOKVII 

La  Bruyere.  And,  to  frame  and  adjust  the  proper 
prosodic  equivalent  of  this,  they,  and  especially  Prior, 
banish  or  reduce  the  roughness,  the  curvets,  the  extrava- 
gances, of  the  Hudibrastic.  They  leave  it,  or  make  it, 
much  more  than  what  Cowper  in  his  earlier  verse,  less 
happily  than  in  his  later  prose,  described  as 

Dear  Mat  Prior's  easy  jingle. 

For  "jingle"  is  derogatory,  and  in  fact  incorrect ;  while  it 
at  least  suggests  a  quite  wrong  sense  for  "  easy."  They 
revive  that  old  quality  of  the  metre  which  has  been 
spoken  of  as  a  danger  in  the  mediaeval  epoch  and  in 
Gower — its  extraordinary  fluidity.  Butler  had  purposely 
broken  its  amble  into  flings  and  plunges  ;  they  restore  the 
ambling  movement,  but  they  take  care  that  its  monotony 
shall  be  relieved,  partly  by  felicity  of  phrase,  partly  by 
slight  but  sufficient  starts  and  quivers.  In  the  three  great 
modern  fabliaux,  in  the  superlative  "  English  Padlock," 
the  equally  great  "  Epitaph,"  the  "  Conversation,"  and  all 
the  rest,  including  even  the  very  early  lines  to  Fleetwood 
Shepherd,  this  process  appears.  Alma,  like  to  Butler  in 
subject,  is  also  rather  liker  to  him  in  versification  :  at  least 
in  parts.  But  in  all,  whatever  the  date  and  whatever  the 
subject,  there  is  to  be  traced  the  desire  of  substituting, 
for  Butler's  idiosyncrasy,  an  easy  descant  with  charm  of 
rhythm  and  rhyme  superinduced  or  transfused  through 
the  clearness  and  workmanlike  efficiency  of  prose. 

It  seems  as  if  he  meant,  if  he  could,  to  do  something 
of  the  same  sort  with  the  other  couplet  in  Solomon,  but 
did  not  dare  for  fear  of  falling  into  the  "  dissoluteness  and 
wildness  of  heroic  with  continued  rhyme."  It  is  not 
surprising  that,  with  such  sentiments,  he  kept  the  triplet, 
the  Alexandrine,  and  the  occasional  incomplete  verse  of 
Dryden.  And  indeed,  in  one  or  two  places,  he  did 
venture  positive  enjambment,  as,  for  instance,  close  to 
the  beginning — 

Happiness,  object  of  that  waking  dream 
Which  we  call  life,  mistaking  ;  fugitive  theme 
Of  my  surprising  verse,  etc. ; 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  429 

where  it  is  noteworthy  enough  that  he  actually  dares  a  tri- 
syllabic foot,  or  at  least  one  that  can  only  be  dissyllabised 
by  the  appalling  pronunciation  " fewdgtive."  He  also 
makes  no  indistinct  attempts  at  a  much  more  varied 
pause  than  couplet  orthodoxy  allows — making  strong 
stops  at  the  second  syllable  frequently,  and  once  or  twice 
at  the  first.  But  he  never  gets  out  of  it,  and  he  could 
not  get  the  combination  of  ease,  variety,  and  fluency  for 
which  his  soul  longed. 

It  was,  as  we  saw,  very  different  with  the  octosyllable,  His  anapaests, 
and  it  was  almost  more  different  still  with  the  combined 
measures  and  with  the  anapaest.  This  last,  indeed,  Prior 
was  the  first  literary  poet  to  instal  in  regular  literary  use. 
Dryden,  as  we  have  seen,  had  done  it,  and  done  it 
admirably  ;  but  in  definite  "  songs  " — generally  so-called, 
sometimes  marked  out  as  such  by  refrains  in  the  old 
"  derry-down "  manner,  and  always  of  the  song  type. 
Prior  extended  the  employment — widened,  as  it  were,  the 
admission  from  that  of  a  mere  performer  in  the  music- 
gallery  to  that  of  an  actual  debutante  on  the  floor  of  the 
ballroom.  I  cannot  remember  anything  earlier  like  the 
famous  "  Secretary,"  which  was  written  as  early  as  1 696. 
It  matters  nothing  that  there  is  French  accentuation — 
there  are  a  good  many  instances  of  it  in  Prior,  as  was 
natural  in  a  man  constantly  speaking  and  writing  French. 
There  is  no  fault  to  find  with  such  a  couplet  as 

This  night  and  the  next  shall  be  hers,  shall  be  mine  : 
To  good  or  ill  fortune  the  third  we  resign. 

And  with  it  the  lighter  English  poetry  entered,  for  all 
purposes,  and  not  merely  for  theatrical  or  musical  ones, 
into  the  possession  of  a  new  medium.  How  charmingly 
"  der  Herr  Secretaris "  employed  and  exemplified  it, 
everybody  at  least  ought  to  know.  Somehow  one  cannot 
imagine 

As  Cloe  came  into  the  room  t'  other  day 

in  any  other  measure — the  misdeeds  and  ingratitude  of 
the  "  ugly  hard  rosebud  "  must  have  remained  untold  or 


430  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

ill-told,  even  by  Herrick,  otherwise.  And  it  is  the 
same  with 

Dear  Cloe,  how  blubbered  is  that  pretty  face — 

quatrain  this  time  and  alternately  rhymed,  with  its  glorious 
challenge  at  the  end  to  grammaticasters.  While  as  for 
"  Down  Hall,"  the  versatile  foot  there  provided  the  lighter 
narrative  poem  with  a  vehicle  as  incomparable  for  its  own 
purposes  :  and  was  as  ready  to  accommodate  the  epigram 
when  "  Bibo  "  and  others  required  it. 

The  general  advantages  of  the  regular  installation, 
among  the  methods  of  recognised  poetry,  of  a  measure  so 
inspiriting,  so  various,  can  escape  no  one ;  but  some 
niceties  of  its  prosodic  property  may  escape  notice,  and 
deserve  indication.  For  instance,  it  opens  the  way  to  a 
whole  class  of  word-values  which  the  iambic  excludes,  or 
only  admits  when  mixed  with  the  anapaest  itself.  Take, 
for  instance,  such  a  word  as  "  laudable."  In  strict  iambic 
you  must  give  that  word  a  secondary  accent,  as  some 
would  say  ;  must  provisionally  lengthen  its  last  syllable,  as 
I  should.  There  is  ample  justification  for  this  ;  it  would 
have  been  actually  spelt,  in  the  rougher  MSS.  of  Middle 
English,  "  lauda$#//."  But  doing  this  weakens  the  length 
and  strength  of  the  legitimate  "  laud- "  and  slightly  alters 
the  balance  of  the  whole  word.  Now  in  that  unkind 
account  of  the  different  fashion  in  which,  on  different 
occasions,  poor  Florimel  bore  her  pleasing  punishment — 

Ten  months  after  Florimel  happened  to  wed 
And  was  brought  in  a  laudable  manner  to  bed, 

the  strict  and  proper  value  of  the  word  reappears  with 
delightful  effect,  and  enables  the  full  stress  to  be  laid  on 
the  right  syllable.  So,  again,  in  the  incomparable  "  Cloe 
Jealous  "  itself,  and  in  one  of  Prior's  most  ravishing  lines — 

The  God  of  us  versemen,  you  know,  child,  the  Sun. 

If  "  child  "  occurred  in  an  iambic  line,  though  it  would  be 
quite  possible  to  put  it  in  the  place  of  a  short  syllable,  the 
admissibility  of  spondees  in  that  measure,  and  the  natural 


CHAP,  in          OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  431 

tendency  of  the  word  to  length,  would  give  a  temptation 
towards  the  lengthening  of  it.  Whereas,  used  as  it  is 
like  "  dear,"  "  friend,"  etc.,  as  a  mere  appellative,  with  no 
weight  laid  on  it,  it  ought  not  to  be  so  lengthened.  Here 
the  metre  itself  forces  the  shortening,  and  you  get  the 
careless,  coaxing  negligence  which  is  wanted.1 

It  is,  in  fact,  hard  to  be  equal  to  this  occasion,  which  The  charm 
is  one  of  the  most  memorable  in  the  history  of  English  of  the  metre> 
prosody.  From  the  "  ugly  hard  rosebud "  that  fell  into 
Cloe's  neck  has  come  a  progeny  of  roses  among  the 
most  exquisite  that  the  garden  of  English  poetry  holds  : 
that  "  little  Dutch  chaise  on  the  Saturday  night "  carried 
with  it  volumes  of  unwritten  verse  of  the  most  adorable 
quality,  besides  the  visible  and  printed  Horace  between 
which  and  the  nymph  the  spare  form  of  Prior  sat  bodkin. 
For  a  time,  indeed,  only  its  lighter  capacities  were  noticed  ; 
though  Byrom,  and  Shenstone,  and  Anstey  developed 
these  well.  But  when  the  greater  Muses  awoke  once 
more,  then  it  was  seen,  and  it  has  been  seen  ever  since, 
what  the  anapaest  could  do :  then,  like  its  own  Jinny,  "  it 
answered  the  end  of  its  being  created."  "  The  Grave  of 
Sir  Arthur  O'Kellyn,"  and  "  Lochinvar,"  and  "Bonnie 
Dundee,"  and  that  less  popular  but  wholly  delectable 
"  When  the  dawn  on  the  mountain  was  misty  and  grey  "  ; 
"  I  come  to  thy  garden  of  roses,"  and  (to  suit  all  tastes), 
"  The  Assyrian  came  down "  ;  "I  saw  from  the  beach," 
and  "  The  Battle  of  the  Baltic  "  ;  "  The  Revenge,"  and  the 
"  Voyage  of  Maeldune  "  ;  all  the  great  things  in  it  from 
"  The  Lost  Leader  "  to  "  Prospice  "  ;  the  master-chorus  in 

1  The  newly  revealed  and  most  amiable  as  well  as  "just"  "Jinny"  (was 
she  the  same  as  "  Coy  Jenny"  who  protests  and  vows  elsewhere  ?)  adds  some 
pleasing  instances  of  the  metre's  virtues,  which  may  be  sampled  : — 

Thus  still  whilst  her  morning  unseen  fled  away, 

In  adorning  the  house,  and  in  making  the  tea, 

That  she  scarce  could  have  time  for  the  psalms  of  the  day — 

And  while  after  dinner  the  night  came  so  soon, 
That  half  she  proposed  very  seldom  was  done, 
With  twenty  "  God  bless  me's,  how  this  day  has  gone  ! " 

While  she  read  and  accounted,  and  paid,  and  abated, 

Eat  and  drank,  played  and  worked,  laughed  and  cried,  loved  and  hated — 

As  answered  the  end  of  her  being  created. 


432  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

Atalanta  and  "  Dolores," — one  could  fill  pages  with  the  mere 
titles  of  only  the  best  serious  things  that  this  bountiful 
and  abounding  measure  has  given  us — things  which  could 
not  have  been  given  without  it.  The  trisyllabic  measures 
are  the  cavalry  of  versification  ;  and  for  English  at  least 
the  anapaest  is 

The  clipper  that  stands  in  the  stall  at  the  top. 


Other  points  Although,  however,  Prior's  accomplishment,  and  still 
Hi^doubie  more  ms  example,  in  the  domiciling  of  the  anapaest  and 
rhymes.  the  octosyllable  are  his  greatest  achievements,  they  are 
not  his  only  ones,  and  there  are  some  minor  points  in 
them  and  in  others  which  deserve  mention.  He  was 
particularly  happy  in  the  smaller  quatrains — "  common  " 
and  "  long."  Not,  indeed,  that  he  had  much  (if  he  had 
anything)  of  the  soar  and  reach  which  we  have  noticed  in 
the  last  chapter  and  which  died  out  in  his  own  earlier 
time.  But  he  could  substitute  for  it  a  quaint  neatness  which 
was  reinforced  and  exchanged  with  a  curious  melancholy 
sentiment,  noticed  by  all  the  best  judges,  but  not  forming 
part,  perhaps,  of  the  popular  conception  of  him.  One  of 
his  main  secrets  in  this  respect  seems  to  me  to  have 
consisted  in  a  singular  and  almost  magical  sense  of  the 
power  of  double  rhymes,  by  themselves  or  intermixed. 
If  the  immortal  "  Child  of  Quality  "  had  been  in  masculine 
rhymes  throughout,  it  would  not  only  have  been  a  false 
concord  with  the  subject,  but  ruinous  to  the  concordat  of 
subject  and  metre.  The  extraordinarily  fine  lines  "  written 
in  M6zeray "  may  seem  to  be  rhymed  double  or  single 
quite  at  haphazard,  but  they  are  not ;  and,  in  particular,  if 
any  one  will  care  to  substitute  a  monosyllable  for  the  last 
word  instead  of  "  weary,"  which  Prior  has  bought  at  the 
not  inconsiderable  expense  of  making  it  rhyme  with 
"  tarry,"  he  will  see  "  how  vast  the  stroke  is  and  how  wide 
the  wound "  (as  Dr.  Watts  pindarically  observes  of  the 
death  of  the  Reverend  Mr.  Gouge).  His  anapaests,  and 
especially  his  alternately  rhymed  ones,  gain  almost  as 
much  from  this  variation  of  play  ;  but  it  is  perhaps  most 


CHAP,  in  OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  433 

noticeable  in  the  shorter  and  mainly  iambic  measures. 
For  instance,  in  the  very  wicked  jests  on  Helen  and  her 
eyebrows  and  the  kitten,  half  the  sting  of  the  last  would 
be  lost  but  for  the  echo  in  the  double  rhyme  of  "  sorrow  " 
and  "  morrow."  Substitute  once  more,  and  see. 

So,  yet  again,  in  the  mocking  English  ballad  on  Namur, 
the  double  rhymes,  which  are  here  not  very  numerous  (Prior 
was  in  his  apprenticeship),  have  the  effect  of  increasing 
the  mock,  just  as  they  have  in  the  Mezeray  piece  of 
emphasising  the  moral ;  their  function,  in  fact,  being  in 
both  cases  that  of  emphasis — of  drawing  attention  to 
whatever  is  the  point. 

But  perhaps  nothing  distinguishes  him  more  from 
most  of  his  predecessors  in  the  use  of  the  anapaest,  and 
indeed  from  not  a  few  practitioners  in  other  metres,  than 
that  naturalness — that  "  never  seeming  to  force  a  syllable  " 
which  Cowper  so  justly  commends.  The  older  anapaestic 
writers  hobble  and  drag  terribly.  Any  three  syllables 
are  good  enough  for  them.  Whereas  with  Prior  a  bad 
foot  is  an  exception.  It  does  occur,  for  instance,  in  the 
"  Cloe  Jealous  "  piece,  where  the  admirable  Shakespearian 
borrowing — 

Let  us  e'en  talk  a  little  like  folks  of  this  world, 

itself  a  capital  example  of  his  style,  is  ushered  at  the  end 
of  the  verse  before  by  the  clogged  stumbling  discord  of 

and  as  old  |  Falstaff  says. 

You  can  do  a  great  deal  with  English  prosody,  she  is  the 
most  obliging  of  damsels  ;  but  you  can't  make  "Falstaff" 
a  pyrrhic  without  her  protesting,  or  at  least  making  a  wry 
face.  Very  seldom,  however,  does  he  do  anything  of  this 
kind.  And  it  is  only  fair  to  add  that  if  he  never  quite 
reaches  the  soar  and  throb  so  often  spoken  of,  he  never 
sinks  into  the  pit  of  bathetic  singsong  which  was  yawning 
for  the  ballad-measures,  and  into  which  they  usually  fell 
even  before  his  death.  The  well-known  Garland1  presents 
a  battered  and  hackneyed  appearance,  rather  because  of 

1  The  pride  of  every  grove  I  chose. 
VOL.  II  2  F 


434  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

its  diction  than  of  its  versification,  which  is  far  from 
unhappy.  And  the  "  worse  answer  "  (which,  accordingly, 
only  not  one  person  knows  for  twenty  that  know  the 
better)  to  "  Cloe  Jealous,"1  is  also  quite  above  the  ordinary. 
To  recur  to  the  M6zeray  lines  from  a  point  of  view  not 
yet  noted,  the  idiosyncrasy  of  Prior's  handling  of  the 
romance-six  is  particularly  observable.  This  was  to  be, 
for  what  sins  of  its  own  it  is  hard  to  say — possibly  for 
those  old  ones  not  quite  expiated  by  Sir  Thopas — a 
great  favourite,  and  a  terrible  victim,  with  the  eighteenth 
century.  Especially  after  Gray,  but  even  before  him 
to  no  small  extent,  it  suffered  from  attention  on  the 
part  of  those  appalling  Odes — Odes  to  Peace,  and 
War,  and  Poverty,  and  Riches  ;  Odes  to  Miss  B.,  and  to 
"  A  Gentleman  Recovering  from  the  Measles  "  ;  Odes  on 
the  Qualities  of  a  Good  Washerwoman,  and  on  the 
Sensations  of  being  Transferred  from  the  Blue  Bed  to  the 
Brown — which  were  the  darlings  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  are  the  stupefaction  of  its  successors.  So  Prior  uses 
it,  in  its  simple  form,  little  or  hardly  at  all.  But  he  lifts 
and  chequers  it,  lengthens  it  with  thought  and  adorns  it 
with  phrase,  drops  lines  and  adds  syllables,  till,  in  these 
altered  but  related  versions,  it  proves  itself  one  of  the 
best  vehicles  for  serious-humorous  verse  ever  devised. 

It  is  possible  that  this  estimate  of  Prior's  importance 
may  seem  extravagant  to  those  who  are  content  to  take 
traditional  opinion.  But  I  think  that  even  here  I  have 
been  able  to  present  some  evidence  to  support  it ;  and  I 
have  not  much  fear  that  any  student  who  has  followed 
this  book  without  finding  himself  shocked  by  its  general 
principles,  and  who  takes  the  trouble  to  study  Prior 
directly,  will  think  me  very  wrong.  Some  of  the  minor 
points  which  I  have  indicated  may  seem  doubtful  to  such 
a  student ;  but  doubt  about  them  will  not  shipwreck  belief 
in  the  main  contention  advanced,  that  the  secure  establish- 
ment, in  an  honoured  station,  of  two  such  metres  as  the 
octosyllabic  couplet  and  the  anapaest  in  its  various  com- 
binations, was  a  matter  of  immense  moment  in  face  of  the 

1  Yes,  fairest  proof  of  Beauty's  power. 


CHAP,  in  OCTOSYLLABLE  AND  ANAPAEST  435 

domination  and  reputation  of  the  heroic.  I  formed  my 
opinion  of  Prior  in  these  respects  a  very  long  time  ago  : 
before  I  had  any  definite  intention  of  treating  this  subject 
systematically,  and  indeed  before  I  had  much  noticed 
the  prose  documents  which  show  that  he  paid  conscious 
and  theoretical,  as  well  as  empirical,  attention  to  prosody. 
And  the  more  I  have  studied  both  the  subject  and  the 
poet  since,  the  more  convinced  I  have  been  on  the  matter. 
He  does  not,  of  course,  rank  as  a  prosodic  influence  with 
Chaucer,  or  Spenser,  or  Milton,  even  with  Dryden  and  Pope. 
But  he  occupies  a  position  different  from  others  and  only 
possible  at  a  peculiar  stage  of  prosodic  history — that  of  a 
man  who,  as  prosodic  civilisation  advances,  takes  care  that 
one  good  custom  shall  not  corrupt  it,  that  room  shall  be 
found  for  different  sorts  and  aspects,  different  spirits  and 
administrations. 


CHAPTER    IV 

PROSODISTS 

Continued  poverty  of  the  subject — Dryden — Mulgrave, 
Roscommon,  etc. 

Continued  THE  remarks  which  were  made  in  the  corresponding 
subjS '°f  ^  chapter  of  the  last  Book  apply  to  the  present  almost 
Dryden.  equally.  Although  it  will  not  exactly  be,  as  that  was, 
a  capitulum  unius  hominis,  there  will  hardly  be  as  much 
to  say  of  any  one  person  as  there  was  there  of  Joshua 
Poole — or  rather  of  "  J.  D."  This  must  be,  of  course,  all 
the  more  surprising  in  that  the  other  J.  D.,  John  Dryden, 
is  of  this  time,  and  that  in  him  we  have  an  example  of 
the  poet-critic  hardly  exceeded  by  any  in  history  :  a  con- 
summate practitioner  in  certain  kinds  of  prosody,  and  a 
man  quite  obviously  interested  in  the  particular  subject, 
who  is  constantly  approaching  it,  who  expressly  laments 
the  lack  of  "  an  English  Prosodia"  and  who  had  thought 
of  supplying  it.  But  something  sealed  his  lips ;  and 
even  when  he  talks  about  "  numbers,"  compliments  Mr. 
Waller  on  his  achievements,  and  so  on,  he  never  tells  us 
exactly  wherein  "  the  sweetness  of  numbers  "  consists.  We 
know  "  in  a  sort  of  way  "  ;  but  it  is  only  in  a  sort  of  way. 
He  thinks *  Chapman's  Homer  characterised  by  "  harsh 
numbers,  improper  English,  and  a  monstrous  length  of 
verse," 2  and  supposes  that  when  Mulgrave  and  Waller  read 
it  "  with  incredible  pleasure  and  extreme  transport "  (as 

1  Dedication  of  Examen  Poeticum  (Ker's  Essays  of  Dryden,  ii.  14). 

2  Observe  that,  as  noticed  above,  he  himself  by  no  means  eschewed  the 
"monstrous"  fourteener,  though,  of  course,  he  did  not  use  it  continuously. 

436 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  437 

some  of  us  also  do),  it  must  have  been  the  Homer  that 
delighted  them,  and  not  the  Chapman.  But  decasyllabics 
alone  will  not  satisfy  him,  even  when  they  are  fairly 
stopped ;  for  he  thinks l  Sandys'  Ovid  "  prose."  He 
says 2  "  that  he  might  descend  to  the  mechanic  beauties 
of  heroic  verse,"  and  tells  us 3  elsewhere  that  he  "  has  long 
had  by  him  the  materials "  (which,  unluckily,  he  never 
worked  up)  "of  an  English  Prosodia  containing  all  the 
mechanical  rules  of  versification."  So  that  as  Jonson 
disappointed  us  in  the  first  half  of  the  century,  so  does 
he  in  the  second.  Yet  we  get  some  hints  from  him. 
He  objects,  in  the  passage  last  quoted,  to  elision,  which 
he  calls  caesura,  and  hints  (saying  he  had  "given  them 
to  his  friends ")  at  the  reason  of  the  sweetness  of 
Denham's  famous  lines,  which  one  may  guess  to  have 
been  the  strong  caesura  in  the  proper  sense,  and  the 
antithesis.  He  frankly  thinks  that  we  are  "  ignorant 
what  feet  ought  to  be  used  in  Heroic  Poetry "  ;  says  he 
borrowed  the  idea  of  using  the  Alexandrine  from  Spenser  ; 
and  has  other  tantalising  glimmers  which  never  come  to 
a  light.  That  he  thought  "  thousands "  of  Chaucer's 
verses  such  that  "  no  pronunciation  could  make  them  other 
than  short  of  half  a  foot  or  even  a  whole  one,"  is  a  well- 
known  example  of  practically  blameless  ignorance. 

If  such  a  man  as  Dryden,  with  his  practice  in  poetry  Mulgrave, 
and  his  interest  in  criticism,  can  give  us  nothing  more 
definite  than  this,  we  are  not  likely  to  get  very  much 
from  Roscommon  and  Mulgrave  on  the  one  hand,  or  from 
Rymer  and  Dennis  on  the  other.  Nor  do  we.  Mulgrave 
of  the  many  titles,  in  his  Essay  on  Poetry,  talks  of 
"  harmonious  numbers,"  and  says  that  the  language  "  must 
soft  and  easy  run,"  but  that  is  about  all,  and  it  does  not 
do  us  much  good.  The  "  unspotted "  Roscommon  in 

1  Ibid.  (Ker,  pp.  9,  10). 

2  Discourse  of  Satan  (Ker,  ii.  no). 

3  Dedication  of  the  JEneis  (Ker,  5i.  217).     This  last  passage  is  the  longest 
and  fullest,  but  provokingly  general.      Its  most  valuable  remark  of  a  strictly 
prosodic  character  is  that  quoted  above  on  Milton — that  what  you  elide  you 
must  not  pronounce.     (For  more  on  this  and  the  whole,  v.  sup.  p.  360,  fit 
the  opening  of  the  present  Book  and  of  the  chapter  on  Dryden. )     But  the 
text  had  perhaps  better  be  given  at  the  close  of  this  chapter. 


Roscommon, 
etc. 


438  THE  AGE  OF  DRY  DEN  BOOK  vn 

his  On  Translated  Poetry  is  a  little  more  precise,  and 
talks  about  "  accents  on  odd  syllables,"  of  "  vowels  and 
accents  regularly  placed "  ;  but  this  does  not  take  us 
much  further.  Rymer  ran  down  Shakespeare,  and  Dennis 
held  him  up  ;  but  neither  in  any  place  grapples  at  all 
closely  with  actual  questions  of  prosody  ;  though  we  are 
sure  that  their  standard  of  "  harmony "  would  have  been 
pretty  much  the  same  as  that  of  the  two  noble  lords. 

The  fact  seems  to  be  that,  till  the  very  end  of  this 
time,  there  were  two  checks  operating  against  the  pro- 
duction of  any  definitely  prosodic  treatise.  It  was 
practically  impossible,  considering  these  general  views 
about  "  harmony,"  "  sweetness,"  etc.,  that  anybody  should 
take  a  complete  view  of  the  subject,  and  include  even 
Elizabethan,  much  more  older  poetry,  in  his  survey.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  there  was  not  as  yet  a  sufficient  supply 
of  the  new  verse  to  serve  as  a  basis  of  study ;  and 
that  verse,  as  preferred  and  validated,  was  exceedingly 
monotonous  in  kind.  Its  producers,  yet  once  more,  were 
too  much  occupied  in  producing  it  to  discuss  it,  and  it 
was  only  after  Dryden's  death  that  Bysshe,  greatly  daring, 
took  upon  himself  the  office  of  legislateur  du  Parnasse 
anglais.  To  tell  the  truth,  we  need  not  regret  the 
absence  of  treatises  at  this  time.  They  might  have 
been  curious  ;  but  they  might  also  have  been  disgusting.1 

1  To  Prior  justice  has  been  already  done,  and  he  is  as  much  of  the  next 
Book  as  of  this.  The  Dryden  passages  referred  to  above  are  as  follows  : — 

"  You  may  please  also  to  observe,  that  there  is  not,  to  the  best  of  my 
remembrance,  one  vowel  gaping  on  another  for  want  of  a  ctzsura,  in  this 
whole  poem  :  but,  where  a  vowel  ends  a  word,  the  next  begins  either  with  a 
consonant,  or  what  is  its  equivalent ;  for  our  W  and  H  aspirate,  and  our 
diphthongs,  are  plainly  such.  The  greatest  latitude  I  take  is  in  the  letter  Y, 
when  it  concludes  a  word,  and  the  first  syllable  of  the  next  begins  with  a 
vowel.  Neither  need  I  have  called  this  a  latitude,  which  is  only  an  explana- 
tion of  this  general  rule,  that  no  vowel  can  be  cut  off  before  another  when  we 
cannot  sink  the  pronunciation  of  it ;  as  he,  she,  me,  /,  etc.  Virgil  thinks  it 
sometimes  a  beauty  to  imitate  the  licence  of  the  Greeks,  and  leave  two  vowels 
opening  on  each  other,  as  in  that  verse  of  the  Third  Pastoral, 

Et  succus  pecori,  et  lac  subducitur  agnis. 

"  But  nobis  non  licet  esse  (am  disertis,  at  least  if  we  study  to  refine  our 
numbers.  I  have  long  had  by  me  the  materials  of  an  English  Prosodia,  con- 
taining all  the  mechanical  rules  of  versification,  wherein  I  have  treated,  with 
some  exactness,  of  the  feet,  the  quantities,  and  the  pauses.  The  French  and 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  439 

Italians  know  nothing  of  the  two  first ;  at  least  their  best  poets  have  not 
practised  them.  As  for  the  pauses,  Malherbe  first  brought  them  into  France 
within  this  last  century ;  and  we  see  how  they  adorn  their  Alexandrines. 
But,  as  Virgil  propounds  a  riddle,  which  he  leaves  unsolved — 

Die,  quibus  in  terrts,  inscripti  nomina  regtim 
Nascantur flares ,  et  Phyllida  solus  habeto — 

so  I  will  give  your  Lordship  another,  and  leave  the  exposition  of  it  to  your 
acute  judgment.  I  am  sure  there  are  few  who  make  verses,  have  observed 
the  sweetness  of  these  two  lines  in  Coopers  Hill — 

Though  deep,  yet  clear  ;  though  gentle,  yet  not  dull ; 
Strong  without  rage  ;  without  o'erflowing,  full. 

And  there  are  yet  fewer  who  can  find  the  reason  of  that  sweetness.  I  have 
given  it  to  some  of  my  friends  in  conversation  ;  and  they  have  allowed  the 
criticism  to  be  just.  But,  since  the  evil  of  false  quantities  is  difficult  to  be 
cured  in  any  modern  language ;  since  the  French  and  the  Italians,  as  well  as 
we,  are  yet  ignorant  what  feet  are  to  be  used  in  Heroic  Poetry ;  since  I  have 
not  strictly  observed  those  rules  myself,  which  I  can  teach  others  ;  since  I 
pretend  no  dictatorship  among  my  fellow-poets  ;  since,  if  I  should  instruct 
some  of  them  to  make  well-running  verses,  they  want  genius  to  give  them 
strength  as  well  as  sweetness ;  and,  above  all,  since  your  Lordship  has 
advised  me  not  to  publish  that  little  which  I  know,  I  look  on  your  counsel 
as  your  command,  which  I  shall  observe  inviolably,  till  you  shall  please  to 
revoke  it,  and  leave  me  at  liberty  to  make  my  thoughts  public.  In  the 
meantime,  that  I  may  arrogate  nothing  to  myself,  I  must  acknowledge  that 
Virgil  in  Latin,  and  Spenser  in  English,  have  been  my  masters.  Spenser  has 
also  given  me  the  boldness  to  make  use  sometimes  of  his  Alexandrine  line, 
which  we  call,  though  improperly,  the  Pindaric,  because  Mr.  Cowley  has 
often  employed  it  in  his  Odes.  It  adds  a  certain  majesty  to  the  verse,  when 
it  is  used  with  judgment,  and  stops  the  sense  from  overflowing  into  another 
line.  Formerly  the  French,  like  us,  and  the  Italians,  had  but  five  feet,  or 
ten  syllables,  in  their  heroic  verse  ;  but,  since  Ronsard's  time  as  I  suppose, 
they  found  their  tongue  too  weak  to  support  their  epic  poetry,  without  the 
addition  of  another  foot.  That  indeed  has  given  it  somewhat  of  the  run  and 
measure  of  a  trimeter ;  but  it  runs  with  more  activity  than  strength  :  their 
language  is  not  strung  with  sinews,  like  our  English  ;  it  has  the  nimbleness 
of  a  greyhound,  but  not  the  bulk  and  body  of  a  mastiff.  Our  men  and  our 
verses  overbear  them  by  their  weight ;  and  Pondere,  non  numero,  is  the 
British  motto." 


INTERCHAPTER    VII 

THE  summing-up  at  this  point  need  not  be  voluminous  ; 
but  it  is  by  no  means  a  superfluity.  In  the  forty  years, 
more  or  less,  which  are  covered,  as  far  as  their  main 
prosodic  symptoms  go,  by  this  Book,  we  find,  for  the 
first  time,  something  like  a  "tyranny,"  in  the  strict  Greek 
sense,  established  in  English  prosody.  Partly  owing  to 
the  operation  of  the  various  causes  and  processes  which 
we  traced  in  the  last  Interchapter ;  partly  owing  to  the 
astonishing  craftsmanship  and  the  overpowering  pre- 
eminence of  a  single  poet, — the  more  or  less  decidedly 
stopped  couplet  has  not  merely  triumphed  over  all  its 
rivals  as  a  vehicle  of  long  narrative  poems,  but  is  bidding 
for  something  very  like  poetical  monopoly.  All  the 
stanzas — even  its  own  nearest  relation,  and,  for  a  time, 
rival,  the  quatrain — are  discountenanced  and  disestablished 
for  this  purpose  of  narration  ;  while,  on  the  other  hand, 
its  peculiar  suitableness  for  argumentative  purposes  puts 
didactic  poetry  more  on  a  level  with  narrative  than  it 
has  ever  been  before — tends,  in  fact,  to  give  the  principal 
place  in  poetry  to  that  to  which  Aristotle  hesitated  to 
give  the  name  of  poetry  at  all.  Assisted  by  the  extra- 
ordinary state  of  disarray  and  decadence  into  which 
dramatic  blank  verse — the  rival  which  had  driven  it  from 
the  stage  seventy  or  eighty  years  earlier — has  fallen,  it 
plays  a  return  match  with  that  rival,  defeats  it  utterly, 
and  holds  the  stage  itself  almost  completely  for  a  time, 
and  more  or  less  for  most  of  the  time.1 

1  Crowne's  Caligula  is  generally  selected  as  the  last  important  heroic  play. 
But  there  were  certainly  others  ;  and  it  continued  for  at  least  a  century.  The 
curious  Battle  of  Aughrim,  by  a  certain  Robert  Ashton,  with  which  Thackeray 

440 


BOOK  vii  INTERCHAPTER  VII  441 

But  its  successes  in  these,  the  greatest  and  most  im- 
portant divisions  of  the  prosodic  field  according  to  general 
estimation,  are  perhaps  not  really  so  remarkable  as  the 
way  in  which  it  tends  to  regard  itself,  and  to  be  regarded, 
as  a  sort  of  universal  standard,  a  Sir-Positive  At-all,  who 
is  fit  for  anything  and  an  expert  in  everything.  The 
beautiful  lyric  of  the  early  part  of  the  century  dies  slowly  ; 
but  it  dies.  The  sonnet  goes  into  a  period  of  almost 
complete  occultation.  Prologues  and  epilogues — those 
gangways  between  poetry  and  drama,  which,  in  their 
earliest  forms,  had  had  rather  a  tendency  not  to  be  even 
decasyllabic — adopt  the  couplet  as  their  regular  and  almost 
(though  not  quite)  their  only  wear.  It  invades  the 
provinces  of  other  metres  in  the  smallest  "  copy  of  verses  "  ; 
and  but  for  the  influence  of  one  or  two  persons — notably 
Prior  and  Swift — might  capture  them. 

But  what  is  more  striking  still,  its  reputation  and 
acknowledged  claims  are  even  greater  than  its  actual 
achievements.  We  have  seen,  in  the  last  chapters  of  the 
last  two  Books,  that,  during  its  rise  and  growth,  a  curious 
dumbness  has  come  on  the  preceptist  side  of  prosody 
after  the  very  considerable  loquacity  of  the  strictly 
Elizabethan  period.  Yet,  in  such  utterances  as  we  have 
been  able  to  catch  and  interpret,  there  has  been  an 
obvious  general  idea  that  the  regular  couplet  is  the  ne 
plus  ultra  of  verse.  This  idea  is  on  the  verge  of  being 
formally  stated  and  codified,  of  being  accepted  in 
practice  and  in  theory,  and  of  holding  its  position  as 
popular  orthodoxy  for  a  full  hundred  years,  if  not  longer. 
Nay,  after  another  hundred  has  completely  passed,  and  a 
third  has  been  entered  upon — during  the  writing  of  this 
very  book,  of  this  very  part  of  it, — I  have  seen  expressions 
in  newspapers  of  the  specially  literary  kind  which  seem 
to  show  that  in  some  quarters  it  is  popular  orthodoxy 
still.  There  is  no  need  of  pointing  out  here  the  advan- 
tages and  disadvantages  of  this  singular  promotion  "  vice 
everything  else  superseded."  They  have  been,  or  will  be, 

deals  in  The  Irish  Sketch  Book,  is  said  to  be  as  late  as  George  the  Third's 
reign.      It  is  heroic  ad  absurdissimum,  and  yet  obviously  serious. 


442  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK 

fully  set  forth  and  dealt  with.  It  is  the  fact  that  we 
have  here  to  lay  down — to  constater — as  the  dominant 
fact  of  the  stage  with  which  we  are  dealing,  and  that 
which  must  be  constantly  borne  in  mind  in  proceeding 
to  and  through  the  next.  But  it  is  important  that  the 
reader  should  not  forget  that  the  success  of  the  couplet 
has  been  obtained  under  peculiar  conditions.  In  the 
first  place,  there  never  was  such  a  "  one-man  "  period  in 
English  poetry  as  the  last  five-and-twenty  years  of  the 
seventeenth  century ;  though  there  have  been  perhaps 
"  no-man "  periods.  There  was  nobody  who  could  be 
put  anywhere  near  Dryden  ;  and  it  was  this  overpower- 
ing, this  hervorragend  eminence — to  give  the  thing  the 
best  word  for  it  in  any  European  language  that  I  know — 
that  did  so  much  to  establish  the  couplet,  which  was 
Dryden's  usual  vehicle. 

But  special  pains  have  been  taken  to  point  out  that 
Dryden  himself  is  by  no  means,  as  Pope  was  practically 
to  be,  a  couplet  metrist  only — that  he  is  an  expert  in 
very  different  metres,  in  fact  in  nearly  all  ;  and  also  that 
his  true  couplet  is  by  no  means  the  stopped  couplet  pure 
and  simple.  The  easements  of  the  Alexandrine  and  the 
triplet,  if  they  interfere  with  its  purity,  enlarge  its  variety 
and  flexibility  very  much.  They  will  perhaps  create  a 
longing  for  variety  and  flexibility  which  will  not  even  be 
satisfied  with  them,  but  will  be  made  keener  when  they 
are  withdrawn. 

Here  also  it  has  to  be  noticed,  as  so  often,  if  not  so 
invariably,  that  the  time  of  the  flourishing  of  tyranny  is 
the  time  of  the  sowing  and  even  the  growing  of  the  seeds 
of  liberty.  At  the  very  moment  when  the  heroic  couplet 
is  driving  the  rabble  of  half-disbanded  blank  verse  from 
the  stage,  Milton  is  rearranging  and  reforming  the  measure 
in  a  fashion  which  will  not  perhaps  serve  for  dramatic 
practice,  but  which  for  the  first  time  will  make  it  available 
for  the  far  wider  and  finer  uses  of  poetry  at  large.  From 
being  "  too  mean  for  a  copy  of  verses,"  he  is  making  it 
fit  for  the  greatest  poetry  ;  and  in  so  doing  is  laying  bare 
and  illustrating  principles  which  will  react  with  tremendous 


vii  INTERCHAPTER  VII  443 

effect  on  other  measures,  and  will  tend  to  make  men 
specially  discontented  with  the  stopped  couplet  itself. 

At  the  very  same  moment  likewise  (Paradise  Lost,  and 
Hudibras,  and  Dryden's  first  heroic  plays,  are  close  to- 
gether1), Butler's  peculiar  revision  of  the  octosyllable,  if 
it  may  seem  to  confine  that  venerable  metre  to  but  a 
part  of  the  ground  which  it  has  hitherto  occupied,  en- 
trenches it  in  that  part  in  the  strongest  possible  fashion, 
and  makes  it  sure  of  popularity  because  it  amuses.  Nay, 
later,  with  a  reversal  of  things  as  humorous  as  its  own 
nature,  people  will  speak  of  poems  like  Scott's  own  as 
being  written  "  in  Hudibrastics."  Always  and  anyhow, 
it  will  provide  for  the  other  couplet  an  alternative  of  the 
most  opposite,  at  any  rate  of  the  most  supplementary 
and  complementary,  character. 

But  a  newer  and  hitherto  less  recognised  force  in 
resistance  and  escape  is  to  be  found  in  the  trisyllabic 
— practically  the  anapaestic — metres,  which,  developed  by 
slow  progress  from  the  debris  of  "  the  heap,"  and  playing, 
like  the  heroes  of  romance,  the  part  of  scullion  or  lackey 
for  a  time,  are  taken  up  even  by  Dryden  himself,  and  by 
others  as  media  for  song-writing  in  and  out  of  plays  ; 
recognised  by  degrees  as  invaluable  alternatives  for 
miscellaneous  verse  ;  and  finally  established  by  Prior  as 
possible  vehicles  for  something  more — capable  of  narra- 
tive, inimitable  in  social  lyric,  employable  in  a  thousand 
different  ways. 

These  are  the  most  dangerous  foes  of  all  to  the  couplet, 
because  they  do  more  than  provide  alternatives,  they 
suggest  things  disastrous,  nay  destructive,  to  the  strict 
decasyllabic  form  of  the  couplet  itself.  When  the  full 
form  of  such  words  as  "  every,"  "  violet,"  "  dangerous,"  is 
seen  to  be  perfectly  melodious,  why  torture  them  into 
the  ugly  cripples  "ev'ry,"  "  vi'let,"  "dang'rous"  ? — which  last 
an  ordinary  Englishman  would  feel  inclined  to  pronounce 
like  "dangle."  When  you  find  that  you  can  say  "the 
eye "  and  "  the  immense "  without  the  least  cacophony, 

1  Hudibras,  1663-8;  Paradise  Lost,  1667  ;   The  Indian  Emperor,  1667, 
but  acted,  1665. 


444  THE  AGE  OF  DRYDEN  BOOK  vn 

why  blurt  out  the  monstrosities  of  "  thimmense "  and 
"  theye  "  ?  "  Oh  !  but,"  say  precisians,  "  these  are  different 
kinds  of  verse."  You  look  back  on  your  Shakespeare, 
whom  you  are  told,  though  with  some  cautions,  to  admire  ; 
you  look  even  on  your  Milton  ;  and  you  find  that  in  the 
same  kind  of  verse  there  are  feet  which  you  cannot  but 
regard  as  trisyllabic.  And  it  will  go  hard  that  you  will 
begin  to  ask,  Why  this  Procrustean  artificiality  ?  Which 
when  you  do,  the  strict  decasyllable  is  doomed. 

Its  doom,  however,  was  not  to  come  upon  it  rapidly  ; 
it  was  to  enjoy  pride  of  place  for  some  three  generations 
more,  and  it  was  even  to  be,  if  weakened,  refined  and 
polished  still  further.  No  "  Mene  Tekel "  was  at  all 
traceable  on  its  palace  walls  in  1700.  And  meanwhile, 
under  the  shadow  of  its  throne,  there  grew  up  among  other 
things  a  fresh  crop  of  prosodic  study,  which,  after  the 
almost  fallow  of  the  last  chapter  and  its  predecessor  on  the 
subject  earlier,  will  give  us  plentiful  matter.  But  we 
must  first  survey  the  final  triumph  of  the  couplet  itself  in 
Pope  ;  and  then  its  decadence  (though  it  was  not  exactly 
that),  and  the  strengthening  of  the  opposing  metres. 


BOOK   VIII 

THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 


445 


CHAPTER  I 

POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET 

Pope's  metrical  unitarianism — His  couplet,  and  its  form — The 
" gradus  epithet" — The  Pastorals — The  Messiah  and  Windsor 
Forest — The  Essay  on  Criticism  and  The  Rape  of  the  Lock — 
The  Elegy  on  an  Unfortunate  Lady — Eloisa  to  A  be  lard — 
Interim  comparison  with  Dryden—  The  Homer — The  Essays 
and  Satires — Their  value  as  chasteners — Pope  in  other  measures 
— After  Pope — Johnson  —  The  partial  return  to  Dryden — 
Savage — Churchill — Goldsmith — Crabbe — Sir  Eustace  Grey, 
etc. — The  heroics — Cowper — His  early  poems — Table  Talk, 
etc.  —  Tirocinium. 


AS   was   observed    previously,    Pope    is    practically   homo  Pope's 

metrica 
unitarianism. 


unius  metri.     The  few  pieces  which  he  composed  in  any  m 


other  would  not  fill  a  dozen  pages,  and  (as  it  has  been 
said  of  the  contemporary  French  lyric  and  the  Alexandrine) 
these  very  pieces  are  seldom  more  than  decasyllabics  cut 
into  lengths.  Of  the  faith  of  which  Bysshe  was  the 
humble  but  undoubting  lawgiver,  Pope  was  the  not  at  all 
humble,  and,  whether  undoubting  or  not,  unhesitating 
high  priest,  as  well  as  victorious  champion.  The  couplet, 
the  pure  couplet,  and  nothing  but  the  couplet,  is  the 
prosodic  heading  of  every  page  of  his  verse,  save  the  few 
noted.  "  There  is  one  metre,  and  Pope  is  its  prophet," 
was  the  doctrine  of  the  greater  part  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  From  one  point  of  view,  therefore,  he  may  seem 
to  demand  very  brief  handling,  and  from  any  point  he 
must  demand  less  than  poets  of  equal  position  who  have 
been  more  polymetric.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is 
under  him  that  we  should  deal  with  the  couplet  itself,  so 
as  to  keep  the  connection  of  poets  and  poetry,  and  to 

447 


448  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

lighten  what  would  be  otherwise  an  unduly  heavy  Inter- 
chapter. 

His  couplet,  The  Popian  couplet  is,  in  its  own  way,  a  Quintessence, 
and  its  form.  an  jTnt;elechy  ;  and  nothing  qui  tient  de  la  Quinte  arrives 
at  perfection  at  once.  Whether  he  composed  his  works 
as  early  as  he  said  he  did,  or  as  early  as  we  know  he  did, 
they  are  still  remarkably  precocious,  and  it  was  not  to  be 
supposed  that  he  would  at  once  discard  the  easements 
and  licences  which  Dryden  had  permitted  and  transmitted. 
Yet,  as  we  see  from  Garth's  Dispensary,  there  was  already 
a  tendency  to  reject  both  the  Alexandrine  and  the  triplet, 
and  it  was  one  of  Pope's  special  characteristics  to  be 
sensitive  to  such  perhaps  not  quite  skiey  influences,  and 
to  express  them  early,  forcibly,  and  in  a  way  finally.  He 
laughed  at  the  Alexandrine  before  he  practically  abandoned 
it :  except  in  very  early  work  he  never  seems  to  have 
been  much  given  to  Dryden's  triplet,  though  he  never 
quite  abandoned  this  either,  using  it  occasionally  with  an 
obvious  desire  for  special — generally  for  comic — effect. 
In  the  case  of  these  two  poets  the  style  certainly  was  "  de 
rhomme  meme"  as  the  probably  better  reading  of  Buffon's 
maxim  runs.  Not  merely  the  range  of  Dryden's  interests, 
and  the  weight  and  vigour  of  his  understanding,  but  a 
certain  bonhomie  which  distinguished  him,  are  reflected  in  his 
metre  ;  Pope's  narrower  accomplishment,  and  his  slightly 
viperish  disposition,  find  their  natural  utterance  in  his. 
But  accomplishment  is  a  very  delightful  thing,  and  the 
viper,  though  a  formidable,  is  really  a  beautiful  beast.  It 
is  very  interesting  to  watch  the  gradual,  though  by  no 
means  tardy,  polishing  and  lightening,  and  in  the  process 
the  necessary  whittling  or  filing  away,  of  the  measure. 
With  the  discard  of  the  Alexandrine  and  the  triplet,  or 
their  very  unfrequent  use,  not  only  is  an  approach  made 
to  the  imaginary  "  purity "  of  the  style,  but  another  and 
still  closer  one  is  also  made  to  its  uniformity,  and  yet 
another,  closest  of  all,  to  its  maximum  swiftness.  This 
latter  desideratum  is  further  secured  by  a  certain  not 
easily  describable  but  most  perceptible  lightening  of  the 
rhymes — a  large  proportion  of  Pope's  final  words  are 


CHAP,  i          POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  449 

monosyllabic, — and  an  avoidance,  not  prudish,  but  evident, 
of  long  and  heavy  vocables  in  the  interior  of  the  lines 
themselves.  The  first  line  is  allowed  to  run  into  the 
second  in  sense,  though  there  is  generally  reserved  a 
perceptible  halt  in  sound  to  mark  it ;  but  one  couplet  is 
never  allowed  to  run  into  another  except  for  some  special 
purpose,  and  seldom  at  all.  The  pause  is  kept  as  nearly 
as  possible  to  the  three  charmed  centre  syllables,  fourth, 
fifth,  and  sixth ;  and  though  antithesis  in  the  halves  is 
seldom  as  striking  as  it  sometimes  is  in  Dryden,  it  is 
perhaps  more  uniformly  present ;  while  that  between  line 
and  line,  or  between  both  halves  of  both  lines,  is  not 
uncommon. 

One  drastic  but  dangerous  device  for  securing  the  The  " 
undulating  penetration  of  the  line  had  been  obvious  from  eplt  et 
the  very  first  in  Fairfax,  and  much  more  in  Waller  ;  while, 
though  avoided  to  a  great  extent  by  Dryden's  masculine 
strength  and  his  fertility  of  ideas,  it  had  become  very 
prominent  in  Garth  and  was  never  relinquished  by  Pope. 
In  fact,  it  is  probable  that  to  his  dealing  with  it  is  due  the 
popularity  of  some  of  his  most  popular  passages.  This  is 
the  use,  either  at  one  place  in  the  line  or  at  corresponding 
ones  towards  its  two  ends,  of  the  "  gradus  epithet,"  the 
filling  or  padding,  the  cheville  as  the  French  call  it,  which, 
when  overdone,  is  perhaps  the  worst  blemish  of  the  style. 
There  are  passages — examples  will  be  given  below 1 — in 

1  The  Rape  passage  will  be  found  further  on  (p.  453),  cited  for  an  addi- 
tional purpose.      Here  is  the  Garth  : — 

With  breathing  fire  his  pitchy  nostrils  blow, 
As  from  his  sides  he  shakes  the  fleecy  snow. 
Around  this  hoary-  prince  from  wat'ry  beds 
His  subject  islands  raise  their  verdant  heads. 

Eternal  spring  with  omiling  verdure  here 

Warms  the  mild  air  and  crowns  the  youthful  year. 

The  vine  undressed  her  sw  oil  ing  clusters  bears, 
The  labouring  hind  the  mellow  olive  cheers. 

Read,  omitting  the  interlined  epithets,  and  you  get  perfectly  fluent  octo- 
syllables. It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  no  novelty  is  claimed  for  this 
demonstration.  The  locus  classicus  for  it  is  the  Introduction  to  The  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel;  but,  as  Scott  there  observes,  "it  had  often  been  remarked" 
before.  In  fact,  Pope  himself  frankly  suggests  it  in  the  Essay  on  Criticism. 
VOL.  II  2  G 


450  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIH 

The  Dispensary  and  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  where  you  can 
convert  the  decasyllabic  into  the  octosyllable  for  several 
lines  together  without  detriment  to  sense  or  poetry,  by 
simply  taking  out  these  specious  superfluities.  No  doubt, 
in  Pope  himself  especially,  there  are  others  where  you 
cannot ;  but  the  temptation  is  a  besetting  one,  and  the 
second-rate  poets  fall  into  it  almost  to  a  man. 

The  Pastorals.  With  Pope,  however,  as  with  other  poets  majorum 
gentium^  we  must  trace  the  successive  shapings  of  this 
famous  instrument.  Let  us  take  his  word  for  it  that  the 
Pastorals,  though  not  published  till  1709,  were  written  five 
years  earlier,  in  their  author's  sixteenth  year.  The  first 
six  lines  will  well  illustrate  the  process  above  outlined  ; 
but  if  space  would  permit,  the  illustration  might  be 
extended  to  the  whole  piece  : — 

First  in  these  fields  I  try  the  sylvan  strains, 
Nor  blush  to  sport  on  Windsor's  blissful  plains. 
Fair  Thames,  flow  gently  from  thy  sacred  spring, 
While  on  thy  banks  Sicilian  Muses  sing  ; 
Let  vernal  airs  thro'  trembling  osiers  play 
And  Albion's  cliffs  resound  the  rural  lay. 

Now  this,  by  the  omission  of  some  of  the  gradus 
epithets,  becomes — 

First  in  these  fields  I  try  the  strains, 
Nor  blush  to  sport  on  Windsor's  plains. 
Fair  Thames,  flow  gently  from  thy  spring, 
While  on  thy  banks  [the]  Muses  sing  ; 
Let  vernal  airs  through  osiers  play 
And  Albion's  cliffs  resound  the  lay — 

where,  if  anybody  prefers  it,  the  fifth  line  may  run — 
Let  airs  through  trembling  osiers  play ; 

for  "  vernal  "  and  "  trembling  "  are  equally  good  illustra- 
tions *  of  that  antithetic  epithet  with  no  antithesis  in  it, 
which  is  the  curse  of  the  style,  and  which  Pope,  though 
he  often  avoided  it  later,  did  not  always,  even  then,  avoid. 

1  Of  course,  I  know  that  he  took  the  idea  from  the  famous  "  inhorruit  veris 
adventus"  (or  "  vepris  ad  ventum  "  !)  of  Horace.  But  this  does  not  affect 
the  point.  In  fact,  it  could  be  made,  if  it  were  worth  while,  to  support  it. 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  451 

This  sample,  purposely  cut  short  in  order  not  to  take 
an  unfair  advantage,  shows  at  once,  but  I  think  without 
appeal,  the  intensely  artificial  character  of  this  versification, 
and  its  attendant  diction.  Poetry  becomes  an  abacus, 
where  a  certain  but  limited  number  of  beads  can  be 
slipped  on  or  off,  arranged  in  corresponding  groups  to 
suit  taste  and  demand.  Dictionaries  of  phrase  and  rhyme 
become,  as  they  were  in  the  "  Maronolatrous  "  period  of 
the  Renaissance,  allowable  and  almost  indispensable,  and 
the  Temple  of  Apollo  is  a  sort  of  poetic  exchange  or 
clearing-house. 

Yet  in  these,  and  in  their  professed  companions  the  The  Messiah 
Messiah  and  the  First  Part  of  Windsor  Forest,  it  would  be 
either  idle  or  uncatholic  to  deny  an  extraordinary  dexterity 
at  the  game,  such  as  it  is.  The  wonderful  nerve  of 
Dryden  (which  Pope  was  hardly  ever  to  reach,  except 
perhaps  in  the  really  magnificent  close  of  the  Dundad}  is 
not  there ;  and  the  matter  is  publica  inateries  enough. 
But  the  "careless  verses,"  which  Langton  in  a  tell-tale 
phrase  complained  of  (as  Boswell  tells  us)  in  Glorious 
John,  are  absent  likewise — the  whole  is  swept,  garnished, 
polished  (furniture -polished  ?)  to  a  miraculous  degree. 
There  are  even  no  triplets,  or  scarcely  any,  though  there 
is  an  Alexandrine  now  and  then  ;  and  the  triumph  of  this 
kind  of  poetical  rhetoric  can  hardly  go  further  than 
the  famous  "  Messiah "  passage.1  Here  the  beads 
are  of  the  best  quality,  being  supplied  from  no  less  a 
treasury  than  that  of  Isaiah  ;  and  the  hand  arranges  and 
shifts  them  on  the  wires  with  all  the  skill  of  an  infant 
phenomenon.  It  is  already  virtuoso  poetry  of  all  but  the 

1  The  swain  in  barren  deserts  with  surprise 
Sees  lilies  spring,  and  sudden  verdure  rise  ; 
And  starts  amidst  the  thirsty  wilds  to  hear 
New  falls  of  water  murmuring  in  his  ear. 
On  rifted  rock,  the  dragon's  late  abodes, 
The  green  reed  trembles,  and  the  bulrush  nods. 
Waste  sandy  valleys,  once  perplexed  with  thorn, 
The  spiry  fir  and  shapely  box  adorn  ; 
To  leafless  shrubs  the  flow'ring  palms  succeed 
And  od'rous  myrtle  to  the  noisome  weed, 
etc.  etc.  etc. 


452  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

highest  kind  ;  and  by  continual  practice  it  is  going  to  be 
made  higher  still.  The  game  is  played  with  all  the 
unnatural  strictness  of  Bysshism.  "  Barb'rous,"  "  wat'ry," 
even  "  vi'let,"  "  th'  enamel'd,"  "  hov'ring,"  "  O'er  'em,"  stud 
the  diction  with  their  maimed  and  crushed  forms  like 
"L'Homme  qui  Rit"  or  the  tortured  pygmies  of  whom 
Longinus  speaks.  One  almost  wonders  that  "  Belerium  " 
and  "  Verrio  "  escape  the  apostrophe  or  the  y. 

The  Essay  on  If  we  turn  to  the  Essay  on  Criticism^  said  to  have  been 
CThcCRapeo?'  written  some  four  or  five  years  later  than  this  group,  it  is 
the  Lock.  interesting  to  find  something  of  a  declension  from  this 
rigid  playing  of  the  game,  not  an  advance  in  it.  The 
Alexandrine  is  indeed  stigmatised  in  the  famous  verse 
that  exemplifies  it ; *  but  there  are  numerous  triplets,  which 
is  explained  by  the  fact  that  the  poem  is  argumentative, 
and  that,  in  consequence,  the  author  not  merely  feels  the 
twenty-syllable  cramp  much  more  sharply  than  in  descrip- 
tive and  imitated  substance,  but  naturally  recurs  to  the 
licence  allowed  himself  by  the  greatest  master,  except 
Lucretius,  of  argumentative  poetics.  The  constraint  and 
the  pattern  are  both  removed  in  The  Rape  of  the  Lock ; 
and  the  triplet  accordingly  disappears.  But  the  gradus 
epithet  and  its  antithetic  distribution  appear  more  than 
ever — for  equally  obvious  reasons.  Point  and  sparkle, 
which  they  supply  at  a  tolerably  cheap  rate,  are  especially 
necessary ;  and  there  is  another  subtle  influence  which 
may  be  seen  in  operation  from  Chaucer  downwards  in 
almost  all  our  greater  poets  except  Milton,  Wordsworth, 
Shelley,  and  Tennyson,  in  whom  the  sense  of  humour 
was  weak  or  intermittent,  and  Byron,  in  whom  it  was 
kept  down  by  egotism  and  affectation.  The  poet,  to 
what  extent  consciously  it  is  difficult  to  say,  caricatures 
himself  and  his  methods  as  a  means  of  adding  zest  to  the 
caricature  of  other  things  and  persons.  This  may  seem 
to  be  considering  too  curiously  as  to  the  cause  ;  the  effect 
is  certain.  The  famous  and,  in  its  rococo  way,  really 

1  It  is  only  fair  to  Pope  to  remind  the  reader,  again,  that  he  also  fully 
admitted  and  illustrated  its  merits  in  the  line  on  his  and  its  great  master —  , 

The  long  majestic  march,  and  energy  divine. 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  453 

beautiful  opening  of  the  second  canto  exhibits  it  in  a 
fashion  which  a  few  italics  ought  to  bring  out  sufficiently  ; 
while  the  other  fashion  in  which  the  verses  "  split "  right 
down  the  paragraph — like  a  bit  of  starch  when  you  drop 
water  on  it — and  the  odd  ridge-backed  appearance  which 
they  present,  may  be  pardonably  illustrated  by  a  very 
slight  violence  to  their  typographical  arrangement  in  a 
note.1 

The  diagram,  I  think,  does  not  bring  out  unfairly  the 
curious  jointed-doll  character  of  the  metre.  Hardly  even 
Johnson's  prose  antitheses  are  more  exactly  proportioned 
than  these :  "ethereal,"  "  purpled,"  and  "  silver  "  in  different 
lines  ;  "  white  "  and  "  sparkling,"  "  Jews  "  and  "  Infidels," 
in  the  same ;  while  the  way  in  which  the  verse  runs  up 
the  hill,  halts,  and  then  runs  down  again,  is  positively 
acrobatic  in  its  deftness  of  mechanic  agility.  For  the 
subject  nothing  could  be  better :  nothing,  at  least  in  a 
poem  of  any  length,  could  well  be  so  good  :  but  then  the 
subject  is — the  subject. 

The  Elegy  on  an  Unfortunate  Lady  answers  the  objec-  The  Elegy  on 
tion  started  in  the  final  words  of  the  last  paragraph,  and  ^ 
shows  once   for   all   qualis  artifex  Pope    was,   and    how 
ridiculous  it  is  to  ask  the  question  "  Whether  he  was  a 
poet  ? "  (I  do  not  say  that  it  is  ridiculous  to  ask  "  What 

Dories    in  (ft. 


•Wri&J""  lively  IOUIV'    ~  '•r'VffiiVt,  J^0re.      *°re' 
but  i 


-2SJB  »£§&» 

r«em  a;/. 


454  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vni 

sort  of  a  poet  was  he  ?  ").  The  general  scheme  of  verse 
is  the  same  ;  but  it  is  altered  with  marvellous  ingenuity 
to  suit  the  particular  matter.  It  is  an  enormous  con- 
fession, though  one  made  quite  safely  to  the  immediate 
readers  —  who  did  not  in  the  least  apprehend  it, — and 
perhaps  even  made  unconsciously  by  the  poet,  that  the 
double  arrangement — the  centred  crease — of  every  line  is 
largely  given  up.  There  are  lines,  and  many  of  them, 
which  have  hardly  more  middle  pause  than  in  Shakespeare, 
save  a  fictitious  one.1  The  gradus  epithet  and  its 
antithetic  use  are  not  absent  ; 2  but  they  are  rarer  and 
subdued,  as  if  purposely.  Old  rhetorical  devices — epana- 
phora 3  especially — are  brought  in  to  heighten  the  style  ; 
to  be  "  sources  of  the  sublime,"  as  Longinus  says.  The 
piece  has  always  been  something  of  a  puzzle,  and  all  the 
exertions  of  the  commentator  as  to  "  Mrs.  W. "  have  not 
quite  cleared  that  puzzle  up.  But  it  remains  Pope's  best 
serious  thing,  untinged  by  satire  —  for  this  last  appears 
even  in  the  Dunciad  "  curtain."  And  it  would  have  been 
interesting  to  see  whether,  if  he  had  made  larger  practice 
in  the  language  of  the  heart,  instead  of  that  of  the  head 
and  the  spleen,  he  could  have  given  yet  further  range  and 
timbre  to  his  poetic  speech. 

to  It  is  only  necessary  to  turn  to  the  other  piece  which  is 
belar  '  sometimes  coupled  with  it,  Eioisa  to  Abelard,  to  see  the 
return  from  the  piano  to  the  pianola  Here  too,  of 
course,  old  Mr.  Pope  would  have  been  justified  in  saying 
"  these  are  good  rhymes,"  but  perhaps  nobody  would  be 
justified  in  saying  much  more.  That  the  artificiality 
which  is  the  curse  of  the  couplet  can  be  vanquished  has 
just  been  admitted :  it  is  proved  not  merely  by  the 
Unfortunate  Lady  and  the  Dunciad-closo,  in  Pope,  but  in 

1  And  separate  from  these  kindred  dregs  below 

Thus,  if  Eternal  justice  rules  the  ball, 

where  there  is  even  something  like  the  abhorred  and  condemned  pause  at  the 
first  syllable  ! 

2  They  are  worst  in  the  opening  lines,  where  the  poet  has  not  warmed  to 
his  work. 

3  "By  foreign  hands"  thrice  repeated. 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  455 

Johnson  by  the  almost  equally  magnificent  and  much 
more  certainly  sincere  termination  of  The  Vanity  of 
Human  Wishes  (where,  however,  there  is  a  strong  infusion 
of  Dryden),  by  Tickell's  splendid  "  Cadogan  "  epicede,  and 
elsewhere.  But  it  has  always  got  to  do  everything  that 
it  knows  to  keep  the  art  from  being  too  obviously  upper- 
most, and  too  suggestively  exclusive.  Eloisa  to  Abelard, 
though  it  is  the  best  of  its  group,  does  not  do  this.  Its 
last  line  — 

He  best  can  paint  'em  who  can  feel  'em  most, 

is  unlucky  in  more  than  its  apostrophes.  The  painting 
of  the  poem  is  admirable,  but  of  the  feeling  it  is  impossible 
to  say  much  ;  and  this  extends  to  the  most  as  well  as  to 
the  least  mechanical  part  of  the  execution.  The  un- 
doubted truth,  and  still  more  undoubted  pointe  — 

All  is  not  Heaven's  when  Abelard  has  part, 
or 

Nor  wish'd  an  Angel  when  I  loved  a  Man  — 

the  frequent  tags  from  Dryden,  which  only  bring  out  the 
difference  of  method,  the  "  roseate  bowers  "  and  "  trances 
ecstatic  "  and  the  rest  —  leave  us  sadly  cold.  It  is  very 
neat  —  very  neat  indeed  ;  but  neatness  is  not  exactly 
poetry. 

The   group,  however  —  the  Eloisa   itself,  Sappho  and  interim  com- 


Phaon,  and   the    Chaucerian   attempts,  —  supplies  a   very  ' 

interesting  opportunity  of  comparison  with  Dryden's 
similar  pieces,  as  illustrating  the  capacities  of  the  two 
couplets  for  this  kind  of  work.  Many  different  judgments 
may,  of  course,  result  from  such  a  comparison  ;  but  there 
is  one  on  which  there  should  not  be  much  controversy. 
Both  forms  admit  the  variety  of  subject  in  a  remarkable 
manner  ;  but  Dryden's  does  this  by  accommodating  itself 
to  them,  Pope's  by  bringing  them  all  under  its  own 
species.  One  can  fully  understand,  though  one  may  not 
share,  the  satisfaction  which  this  latter  process  gives  to 
those  who  think  the  particular  couplet  the  highest  of 
created  things  poetic  ;  but,  without  that  premiss  of 


456  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

feeling,  one  may  prefer  the  way  in  which  such  exceedingly 
different  things  as  The  Flower  and  the  Leaf  and  Theodore 
and  Honoria,  for  instance,  are  rendered  with  almost  a  full 
representation  of  their  difference,  as  compared  with  the 
rather  too  uniform  interpretation  of  Sappho  and  Phaon  on 
the  one  hand  and  The  House  of  Fame  on  the  other. 
Certainly  the  hall-mark  is  there  ;  but  a  hall-mark  is 
required  to  certify  something  of  which  we  cannot  judge 
without  it ;  we  had  rather  be  left  to  our  own  hall-marking 
in  matter  of  which  we  can  judge. 

Although  it  would  be  rather  absurd  to  speak  of  the 
verse  which  has  been  surveyed  as  juvenilia  —  for  Pope 
was  never  exactly  juvenile,  just  as  he  was  never  at  all 
senile — it  may  in  a  sense  be  all  classed  together,  inas- 
much as  it  is  divided  from  the  great  achievement  of  the 
Moral  Essays  and  Satires  by  the  famous  interval  which 
the  poet  described  (in  his  wontedly  amiable  manner  both 
as  to  inclusion  and  omission  of  coadjutors)  as 

Pope  translating  ten  long  years  with  Broome 

The  Homer.  ("  Fenton  with  them,"  as  it  might  be  put  legally).  This 
interval  is  curiously  parallel  to  that  which  Dryden 
experienced  in  no  very  different  length  of  years,  as  a 
result  of  his  dramatic  avocation  from  poetry  proper, 
between  Annus  Mirabilis  and  Absalom  and  Achitophel. 
The  results  corresponded  to  the  character  of  the  poets. 
Dryden,  who  had  begun  with  infinite  "  body  "  and  a  quite 
new  grip  of  verse,  emerged  from  his  corvee  with  rough- 
nesses smoothed,  but  with  the  secret  of  variety  unimpaired. 
Pope,  who  had  begun  by  an  imitative  correctness,  came 
out  with  increased  and  concentrated  deftness  of  practice, 
but  with  something  like  a  definite  committal  to  one  form 
of  verse.1 

It  is,  however,  most  interesting,  and  should  supply  a 
fresh  evidence  of  Pope's  craftsmanship,  to  find  that  though 
his  thirteen  years'  practice  in  translation  is  in  a  sense  a 

1  "Definite" — but,  of  course,  not  absolute.  Enough  of  the  old  satiric 
freedom  remains  to  enable  him  now  and  then  to  roughen  his  lines  effectively. 
(For  his  own  views  on  the  couplet  see  note  at  end  of  chapter.) 


CHAP,  i          POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  457 

"  loop  " — that  though  he  comes  back  at  the  end  of  it  to 
his  old  style  like  a  giant  refreshed,  he  has  not  been 
pursuing  that  style  with  slavish  exactness  or  constancy 
inviolable  meanwhile.  The  fact  is  that,  like  a  wise  man, 
he  evidently  had  consulted  Dryden's  translations  afresh 
before  he  attempted  his  own,  and  that  he  to  some  extent 
recurs  to  the  Drydenian  model  rather  than  to  his  own. 
He  is,  perhaps,  rather  more  faithful ;  and  this  fidelity 
itself  keeps  out  the  antithetic  gradus  epithet — to  some 
extent  only.  In  the  same  way,  Homer  does  not  so  very 
frequently  admit,  and  certainly  never  invites,  the  antithetic 
or  "  ridge-backed "  division  of  the  line  itself.  On  the 
other  hand,  he  does  invite  the  Alexandrine  ;  and  Pope 
finds  this  by  no  means  "  needless,"  and  manages  to  make 
it  by  no  means  "  slow." 

Still,  the  whole  medium,  deft  as  it  is,  has  much  more 
monotony  than  Dryden's,  and  its  peculiar  character  is 
almost  sufficiently  indicated  by  the  well-known  fact  that 
there  is  really  very  little  difference  between  the  work  of 
Pope's  coadjutors  and  his  own — a  fact  which  ought  to  be 
taken  in  conjunction  with  the  anticipations  of  Garth  and 
Young,  and  the  "  tune  by  heart "  of  all  the  couplet- 
warblers  of  the  rest  of  the  century.  The  Popian  line  is 
indeed  so  thoroughly  "  standardised  " — its  parts  are,  like 
those  of  a  cheap  watch,  made  so  perfectly  interchangeable, 
that  in  its  mere  prosodic  influence  there  is  hardly  any 
secret  effect  left  possible.  Had  Pope  chosen  to  use  more 
such  feet  as  that  of  which  he  recognised  (or  perhaps  only 
half  recognised)  the  beauty  in  "  The  freezing  Tanais,"  to 
Johnson's  equally  illuminating  astonishment,1  the  case 
would  have  been  different.  But,  as  it  is,  it  is  hardly  even 
a  case  of  the  well-known  fiddle-and-rosin  character.  The 


1   "I  have  been  told  that  the  couplet  by  which  he  declared  his  own  ear  to 
be  most  gratified  was  this — 

"  Lo  where  Maeotis  sleeps,  and  hardly  flows 
The  free  |  zing  Tana  |  is  through  a  waste  of  snows. 

But  the  reason  of  this  preference  I  cannot  discover." — Life  of  Pope. 

We  can.     The  vowel  music  is  good  ;  but  it  is  the  tribrach  that  does  it.      At 
the  same  time  I  could  wish  that  the  -is  were  not  repeated  so  correspondingly. 


458  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

rosin  as  well  as  the  fiddle  is  within  the  reach  of  Hoole 
as  well  as  of  Pope.  There  is,  of  course,  a  difference,  and 
a  vast  one,  between  Pope  and  Hoole  ;  but  that  wants  a 
different  simile.  The  glass  is  the  same  glass  almost 
exactly  ;  but  the  wine  poured  in  is  very  different. 
The  Essays  The  quality  of  the  wine  which  Pope  poured  out  for 

and  Satires,  ^jg  guests  in  the  Essays  and  Satires  is  well  known. 
People  may  call  it  amontillado  or  absinthe,  vermouth  or 
vitriol,  as  they  like  ;  in  fact,  it,  at  different  times,  deserves 
well  enough  each  of  the  four  descriptions.  But  we  are 
here  concerned  with  this  wine  only  in  connection  with  its 
glass.  It  is  certain  (to  drop  the  metaphor)  that  no  other 
form  of  verse  has  ever  been  devised  which  would  have 
suited  the  matter  so  well ;  while  there  is  no  other  example, 
in  all  literature,  of  a  single  metre  (except  perhaps  the 
Lucretian  hexameter)  in  such  absolute  adaptation  to  the 
temper  and  mood  of  the  poet.  Pope  may  have  lisped  in 
numbers :  he  certainly  thought  in  couplets.  Moreover, 
now  that  he  was  free  from  translation,  he  went  back, 
naturally  enough,  to  his  own  more  special  form,  and 
brought  that  form  closer  and  closer  to  its  highest — or 
lowest — terms.  Here  you  may  turn  pages  and  pages 
without  finding  a  triplet ;  while  the  Alexandrine  is  never 
used  unless  for  some  very  special  purpose.  There  is 
hardly  such  a  thing  as  a  rough,  a  loose,  or  a  limping  line. 
We  think  most  naturally  of  the  purple  patches :  the 
"  Atticus "  libel,  written  earlier  no  doubt,  but  polished 
and  published  now  ;  the  Dunciad  conclusion  ;  the  scores 
of  passages  only  less  famous,  and  the  hundreds  or 
thousands  of  couplets,  lines,  or  phrases,  which  are  (or 
recently  were)  part  of  the  language  of  every  educated 
Englishman.  But  this  is  in  a  way  unjust ;  for  the 
difficulty — not  quite  the  impossibility — would  be  to  find 
anything  that  is  not  perfect  according  to  its  own  standard 
of  perfection. 

Their  value  as         Nor    should    it    be    forgotten    that,    narrow    as    that 

chasteners.       standard    is,  its   conditions,  both    positive  and   negative, 

include  some  of  very  great    prosodic  value.     After  the 

stress  already  laid   in  these  volumes  on  the  advantages 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  459 

of  prosodic  freedom,  and  on  the  special  and  immemorial 
privilege  of  English  prosody  in  that  respect,  no  more 
need  be  said  on  that  side.  But  it  must  be  remembered 
that  this  freedom,  as  in  all  cases,  was  dangerously  likely 
to  pass  into  a  tolerance  of  anarchy.  Anglo-Saxon  prosody, 
to  say  the  least,  had  not  been  remarkable  for  definitely 
metrical — that  is  to  say,  measured — rhythm.1  The 
struggle  to  attain  and  maintain  this,  in  the  thirteenth 
and  fifteenth  centuries  respectively,  had  not  been  a  light 
or  short  one  ;  it  had  been  well-nigh  lost  in  the  fifteenth, 
and  in  some  respects  rather  jeopardised  in  the  seventeenth 
itself.  It  was  therefore  none  the  worse,  in  the  long-run, 
that  for  a  time  regularity,  even  of  an  excessive  and 
meticulous  kind,  should  be  inculcated.  The  danger  of 
this  "  entering  into  the  soul " — which  had  been  very  great 
in  the  thirteenth  century,  and  not  slight  in  the  sixteenth 
— was  now  past.  The  accumulated  patterns  of  English 
verse  included  by  this  time  examples  of  liberty  and 
variety  too  great  and  too  numerous.  For  a  little  while 
it  could  well  be  tolerated,  as  we  see  when  we  look  back 
on  the  whole  life  of  the  subject,  that  bandage  and  bearing- 
rein  should  be  applied.  Even  for  the  century  of  exu- 
berance which  was  to  follow,  the  preparation  was 
probably  of  the  greatest  value ;  while  the  results  of 
that  preparation  itself  in  the  middle  or  applied  styles 
of  poetry  were  such  as  no  literature  can  afford  to 
despise. 

Pope's  essays  in  metres  other    than  the  couplet  are,  Pope  in  other 
it  has  been  said,  few  and  unimportant :  they  are  certainly  m 
not    worth    dealing  with    elsewhere    in    connection    with 
those    metres    themselves,    and   we    may    therefore    best 
interpolate  a  paragraph  before  proceeding  to  notice  the 
couplet  in  the  hands  of  the  rest  of  the  school.      It  was 
impossible  that  any  one  of  them  should  be  exactly  bad, 
prosodically  speaking,    but    they  were   evidently  written 
mainly  as  exercises   and  with    no  zest    or    gust.      It    is 

1  I  say  this  in  full  knowledge  of  the  elaborate  and  rather  pathetic  systems 
of  "stresses"  and  "half-stresses,"  x  s  and  's  and  V  and  the  like,  which  have 
been  devised  to  supply  what  is  invisible  and  inaudible  without  them. 


460  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK vm 

perfectly  clear  that  the  "  St.  Cecilia's  Day "  Ode  would 
not  have  been  written  if  Dryden  had  not  written  on  the 
same  theme  before ;  and  few  will  contest  the  superiority 
of  the  earlier  master.  Warton,  indeed,  exhibits  one  of 
the  mistakes  of  the  century  when  he  stigmatises  the 
attempts  at  triple  time  as  "  burlesque,  low,  and  ridiculous  "  ; 
but  the  poet  is  but  ill  at  them,  and  obviously  un- 
comfortable till  he  comes  back  to  his  decasyllabics. 
Instead  of  the  verse  being  fused,  it  is  built ;  and  that  is 
fatal  in  lyric.  Something  of  the  same  fault  recurs  else- 
where. The  "  Ode  on  Solitude  "  is  not  unmelodious,  but 
"  The  Dying  Christian  "  is  still  only  cut-up  couplet,  as  is 
"  The  Universal  Prayer."  The  octosyllables  deserve  no 
special  characterisation.  The  "  Verses  to  Lady  Frances 
Shirley,"  the  "  Challenge,"  the  delectable  "  Song  by  a 
Person  of  Quality,"  and  the  famous  "  Lines  on  Lady 
Suffolk "  are  all  the  work  of  a  consummate  man  of 
letters,  who  clothes  the  thing  he  is  writing  in  the 
appropriate  prosodic  garb.  But  things  nearly,  if  not 
quite  as  good,  have,  by  taking  the  proper  patterns,  been 
written  by  men  who  had  no  pretensions  to  be  poets  at 
all  in  the  sense  in  which  Pope  certainly  was  a  poet ;  and 
things  infinitely  better  have  been  written  by  some  who 
were  hardly  as  great  poets  as  he. 

After  Pope.  Since  the  very  qualities  of  this  couplet  make  it  more 
uniform  the  more  it  tends  to  perfection,  it  follows  that 
while  it  is  in  that  perfection  it  has  little  history.  From 
Pope  to  Crabbe  in  time,  and  from  Pope  to  Hoole  in 
another  scale  of  reckoning,  it  has  few  vicissitudes,  and 
hardly  more  than  one  sectarian  difference,  as  we  may 
call  it.  This  is,  indeed,  somewhat  important,  being  a 
reaction  in  the  hands  of  Churchill  (or  perhaps  of  Savage 
first),  and  after  and  from  him  in  those  of  Cowper,  to 
something  more  like  the  Drydenian  model.  But  this 
is  not  encouraged  by  the  theory,  and  still  less  by  the 
practice,  of  Johnson,  the  dominant  literary  influence  of  the 
time,  and  it  never  becomes  ruling  or  orthodox.  It  has, 
however,  not  a  little  influence  in  the  unsettlement  of  the 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  461 

prosodic  autocracy,  which  is  the  main  feature  of  the 
period.  The  couplet,  like  other  autocrats,  cannot  afford 
to  transact  with  liberty  in  any  way :  alone  it  has  to 
make  the  happiness  of  its  people.  As  soon  as  they 
find  other  charmers,  or  as  soon  as  it  relaxes  its  chains, 
its  day  is  done. 

We  must  remember,  however,  that  Johnson's  two  Johnson. 
short  but  remarkable  couplet  pieces  were  published,  the 
one  when  Pope  was  still  alive,  the  other  when  he  had 
not  long  been  dead.  Their  author  had,  it  need  hardly 
be  said,  a  great  and  just  admiration  for  the  earlier  master 
of  the  couplet ;  and  with  that  unerring  sense  of  kind 
which  is  one  of  the  better  features  of  Classicism, 
his  Prologues,  though  with  somewhat  less  licence,  are 
Drydenian  in  stamp.  But  the  other  form  was  certainly 
much  more  to  his  liking. 

In  London  especially,  the  "  splittable "  form — which 
tempts  one  to  treat  it  like  those  rolls  they  call  pistolets, 
and  bend  it  backwards  into  halves — is  very  frequent. 
Antithesis  and  balance,  both  in  prose  and  verse,  were 
such  delights  to  Johnson  that  he  was  bound  to  prefer 
the  form  that  supplied  them  most  freely  ;  and  besides, 
his  general  critical  tendencies  would  always  have  led  him 
to  select  the  variety  nearest  to  the  apparent  norm  as  the 
best.  Even  in  London,  however,  the  gradus  epithet  does 
not  make  very  great  conquest  of  him  ;  though  it  does 
sometimes,  as  with  . 

Some  pleasing  bank  where  verdant  osiers  play, 

and  where  one  does  not  know  whether  the  bank  or  the 
osier  ought  to  blush  most  at  its  companion.  Usually, 
however,  Johnson's  vigour  and  fecundity  of  thought  make 
this  unnecessary  ;  and  in  the  conclusion  of  The  Vanity  of 
Human  Wishes  he  has  reached  one  of  the  oftenest-quoted 
triumphs  of  the  style.  It  is  curious  how  the  dangers 
and  temptations  of  that  style  are  surmounted  here.  Not 
a  word  is  otiose  in 

Must  dull  suspense  corrupt  the  stagnant  mind. 


46z  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

The  contrasted  colour  and  value  l  of 

Roll  darkling  down  the  torrent  of  his  fate 

might  be  the  text  of  no  short  lesson  in  prosodic  art. 
The  middle-creased  lines  are  varied  and  intermingled 
with  straight-running  ones,  till  the  "  fold  "  effect  is  wholly 
obliterated,  and  the  piece  has  almost  the  virtue  of  a 
blank-verse  paragraph — praise  for  which  Johnson  would 
not  have  been  grateful.  The  rise  of  the  rhythm  is 
extraordinary  ;  and  it  is  pleasant  to  see  how  the  poet 
has  resorted  to  the  good  old  device  of  epanaphora — "  For 
love  "  ;  "  For  patience  "  ;  "  For  faith  "  ;  "  These  goods  "  ; 
41  These  goods " — in  order  to  gain  the  upper  levels  of 
the  air.  And  if  the  halved  or  folded  verse  makes  its 
appearance  once  more  at  the  end  among  these,  it  is  all 
in  the  right  way  of  the  rhythm  :  the  wings  themselves 
are  folding  as  the  poem  sinks  to  the  rest  and  resignation 
that  itself  expresses.2 

It    is  well  known    that    Johnson  actually  "  coached " 

1  The  picture  of  the  line  is  good :  its  resonance  almost  better.  Notice 
how  the  dissyllables  "darkling"  and  "torrent"  not  only  correspond  with 
each  other,  but  adopt  in  a  cross  contrast,  interesting  to  compare  with  Johnson's 
similarly  adjusted  contrasts  of  meaning  in  prose,  the  sounds  of  the  mono- 
syllables "roll"  and  "fate."  The  a  of  " darkling "  is  related  (we  will  not 
say  "  exactly,"  in  order  not  to  excite  a  querelle  cCallemand  with  the  phoneti- 
cians, but)  generically  to  that  of  "fate"  as  the  o  of  "torrent"  to  that  of 
"roll." 

2  Where  then  shall  Hope  and  Fear  their  objects  find  ? 
Must  dull  suspense  corrupt  the  stagnant  mind  ? 
Must  helpless  man,  in  ignorance  sedate, 
Roll  darkling  down  the  torrent  of  his  fate  ? 
Must  no  dislike  alarm,  no  wishes  rise, 
No  cries  invoke  the  mercies  of  the  skies  ? 

Yet,  when  the  sense  of  sacred  presence  fires 

And  strong  devotion  to  the  skies  aspires, 

Pour  forth  thy  fervours  for  a  healthful  mind, 

Obedient  passions,  and  a  will  resigned  ; 

For  love  which  scarce  collective  man  can  fill ; 

For  patience,  sovereign  o'er  transmuted  ill ; 

For  faith  that,  panting  for  a  happier  seat, 

Counts  death  kind  nature's  signal  of  retreat. 

These  goods  for  man  the  laws  of  Heaven  ordain, 

These  goods  He  grants  who  grants  the  power  to  gain  ; 

With  these  celestial  Wisdom  calms  the  mind, 

And  makes  the  happiness  she  does  not  find. 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  463 

Goldsmith  and  Crabbe  ;  it  is  equally  well  known  that 
Churchill  and  Cowper  were  rebels  to  his  influence.  But 
all  these  and  one  or  two  others  may  follow  him  in  this 
notice,  which,  in  fact,  need  not  be  long  ;  for,  except  that 
they  are  by  no  means  always  "strong,"  Gyas  and 
Cloanthus l  themselves  deserved  no  more  individual  men- 
tion than  the  average  eighteenth-century  coupleteer. 

The  couplet  work  of  Thomson,  Tickell,  and  one  or  The  partial 
two  others,  especially  that  of  Young  and  Akenside,  has 
been,  or  will  be,  incidentally  mentioned ;  but  here,  if 
anywhere,  is  the  place  to  mention  Savage.  I  have  very  Savage. 
little  respect  for  Savage  as  a  poet ;  and  when  he  has 
been  praised,  I  think  he  has  generally  been  overpraised. 
But  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that  in  his  rambling,  ill-con- 
ditioned, bombastic  verses  there  is  already  something  of 
that  return  to  Dryden  which,  as  has  been  said,  is  the 
most  important  fact,  outside  the  actual  achievements 
of  Pope  and  Johnson,  to  be  mentioned  in  this  chapter. 
As  Savage,  we  know,  was  a  very  careful  proof-corrector, 
it  must  be  supposed  that  he  had  some  principles  of 
correction  ;  and  among  them  a  more  or  less  definite 
prosodic  standard  may  have  been  one.  This  standard 
in  The  Wanderer  (which  is  as  early  as  1729),  in  The 
Gentleman,  and  other  pieces,  is  not  very  different  from 
Pope's.  But  it  is  otherwise  in  The  Bastard,  which  is 
probably  Savage's  sincerest  poem,  though  it  is  impossible 
to  say  whether  he  had  merely  persuaded  himself  into 
sincerity.  The  solidity  of  run,  the  absence  of  hinge  and 
fold,  which  distinguishes  Dryden,  are  to  be  found  in  the 
famous 

No  tenth  transmitter  of  a  foolish  face, 
in 

His  body  independent  as  his  soul, 
in 

Warm  championess  for  freedom's  sacred  cause. 

Even  when  he  balances,  the  balance  has  Dry  den's,  not 
Pope's,  mark  on  it — 

1  But  Gyas  and  Cloanthus  pulled  a  good  stroke  in  the  regatta  ;  and  so  did 
some  of  these. 


464  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

Conceived  in  rapture,  and  with  fire  begot, 
or 

Who  most  shall  give  applause  where  all  admire  ; 

while  sometimes,  as  in 

On  that  kind  quarter  thou  invad'st  me  not, 

the  whole  character  of  the  line,  in  composition,  rhythm, 
and  phrase  alike,  is  of  the  older,  not  the  newer  type. 
ChurchilL  But  Savage  was  a  man  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
though  of  just  its  close.  Churchill  was  more  than  a 
generation  younger,  and  had  he  reached  the  statutory 
days  of  our  life,  would  have  actually  seen  the  nineteenth. 
His  partial  desertion  of  Pope  for  Dryden  as  a  model  is 
itself  part  of  a  general  literariness,  which  has  perhaps 
never  been  quite  sufficiently  realised.  Everybody  who 
has  written  on  him  has  seen  that  he  studied  his  heroics 
from  Dryden  and  Pope,  his  octosyllables  from  Butler  and 
Swift.  But  I  do  not  know  whether  anybody  has  noticed 
that  much  of  his  verse  is  a  mere  cento  from  these  authors, 
from  Shakespeare,  and  from  others.  If  you  were  to  print 
Churchill  with  the  borrowed  phrases  in  different  inks, 
the  page  would  look  like  a  harlequin's  coat.  This  was 
not  plagiarism — the  passages  were  generally  known  as 
a  rule,  and  nobody  could  hope  to  escape  detection  in 
conveying  them.  Nor  do  I  think  that  it  was  either 
barrenness  or  pure  laziness.  It  was  simply  that  Churchill 
(who,  let  it  be  remembered,  was  a  very  young  man  at 
his  death)  wrote  in  great  haste,  was  full  of  his  books, 
and  so,  being  in  a  hurry,  sent  out  his  thought  clothed  in 
the  wardrobe  of  his  memory.  It  is  probably,  therefore, 
less  by  distinct  design  than  because  of  the  mixture  of 
influences  and  origins  that  his  verse  comes  to  wear  an 
older  appearance  than  that  of  Pope,  whom  sometimes  he 
follows  close  enough  to  give  the  work  the  air  of  imita- 
tion and  even  burlesque.  Still,  that  this  work,  which  was 
undoubtedly  popular  (as  most  work  which  is  ill-natured 
and  deals  with  current  events  and  living  characters  is 
for  a  time),  had  an  anti-Popian  effect  is  indubitable  ;  and 
it  had  perhaps  most  of  this  on  Cowper,  his  school-fellow 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  465 

and  admirer.  But  before  coming  to  Cowper  we  may 
say  something  of  the  "  ruck  "  of  the  Pope  school  itself, 
of  Goldsmith,  and  of  Crabbe. 

Pope  is  to  such  writers  as  Pitt  of  the  Vida  translation, 
of  the  Virgil  which  is  not  Dryden's,  and  other  things, 
much  what  the  other  Pitt  "  was  to  Addington," — as  a  capital 
to  its  suburbs.  Indeed,  much  more  also ;  for  suburbs 
sometimes  have  more  character  than  the  capital,  and  the 
Popelings  certainly  have  not  more  character  than  Pope. 
Indeed,  most  of  them  have  no  character  at  all ;  and  one 
turns  the  pages  of  Chalmers  without  being  able  to  hit 
on  a  single  patch  of  colour — not  in  the  sense  of  anything 
purple  or  splendid,  but  merely  in  that  of  something  dis- 
tinguished. They  all  have  the  prize-poem  style :  they 
are  reeled  off,  sometimes  very  decently,  but  that  is  all. 
"  How  a  thousand  more  ? "  you  say  to  the  author ;  and 
if  you  are  wise,  stroll  on  without  making  a  bid. 

Of  course,  there  are  exceptions ;  and  Goldsmith  is  Goldsmith. 
the  chief  of  them.  But  then  Goldsmith  was  a  poet  in 
his  way,  and  he  might,  like  his  great  friend's  other  friend, 
have  said  that  he  tried  to  be  a  coupleteer,  but  poetry 
was  always  breaking  in.  Moreover,  as  was  said,  that 
great  friend  certainly  coached  him — in  The  Traveller  more 
particularly.  Both  it  and  The  Deserted  Village  are 
studies  prosodically  curious  in  a  minor  way.  They  are 
like  prize  poems  in  which  a  poet  should  have  written  the 
piece  (good-naturedly  or  mischievously)  for  a  school-boy 
and  kept  within  the  model  as  well  as  he  could.  Much 
of  the  charm  of  the  Village  is  due  to  Goldsmith's  de- 
lightful style  and  his  charming  temper,  which  soften  and 
humanise  the  rather  icy  glitter  and  contour  of  the  couplet. 
The  finer  pieces  in  The  Traveller  are  distinctly  Johnsonian. 
On  the  whole,  the  two  are  among  the  most  gilt-edged 
assets  and  securities  of  the  couplet-stock — but ! 

Although  Crabbe  far  outlived  Cowper,  and  is,  in  fact,  Crabbe. 
our  main  link  of  connection,  biographically,  with  the  next 
volume,  his  prosody  is  of  a  much  older  type  than  Cowper's, 
and  should  be  despatched  first.     With  hardly  more  than 
one    important  exception  (the  alternately  rhymed   octo- 

VOL.  II  2  H 


466  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vn 

syllables  disposed  in  batches  of  four,  or  six,  or  eight,  in 
sir  Eustace  Sir  Eustace  Grey,  The  Hall  of  Justice,  Woman,  etc.),  his 
Grey,  etc.  work,  as  known  ever  since  his  death,  is  in  the  heroic 
couplet.  These  octosyllables  resemble  the  work  of 
Mickle  and  one  or  two  other  late  eighteenth-century 
writers  who  were  acquainted  with  Percy,  and  to  some 
extent  (as  Crabbe  was  certainly)  with  the  Elizabethans  ; 
and  who  get  out  of  the  form  a  narrative  medium,  rather 
jingly  and  cheap,  but  swift  enough  and  by  no  means 
ineffective.  In  particular,  the  octaves  of  Sir  Eustace 
Grey^-  which  are  rhymed  ababbcbc  (the  individual  quatrains 
reminding  one  strikingly  of  Mickle's  Cumnor  Hall),  con- 
tain Crabbe's  most  imaginative  work ;  but  this  piece 
was  written  well  within  the  nineteenth  century.  It  is 
particularly  noticeable  for  the  boldness  of  enjambment, 
not  merely  between  line  and  line,  but  between  the  halves 
of  the  stanza  ;  while  a  further  licence,  which  would  have 
shocked  Crabbe's  earlier  contemporaries,  is  taken  in 
extending  the  two  first  stanzas,  to  a  dixain  and  a  nine- 
lined  stave,  by  extra  lines  differently  rhymed  in  the  two 
examples.  Probably,  as  the  subject  of  the  piece  is  a 
madman,  Crabbe  either  permitted  himself  or  infinitely 
aimed  at  a  corresponding  irregularity. 

The  heroics.  There  is  nothing  of  the  kind  in  his  voluminous  heroics, 
where  the  prosody,  perhaps  as  much  as  anything  else, 
procured  him  the  famous,  if  rather  unjust,  label  of  "  Pope 
in  worsted  stockings."  Johnson,  as  it  happens,  was 
fond,  we  know,  of  these  latter  garments  in  the  non- 

1  He  used  this  form  also  in  The  World  of  Dreams,  which  is  not  very 
dissimilar  in  subject.  Of  course,  in  noticing  this  form  and  the  couplet  I  do 
not  mean  to  imply  that  Crabbe  used  no  others.  On  the  contrary,  both  in 
his  previously  known  Juvenilia  and  other  miscellanies,  and  in  the  new  work 
which  has  been  made  accessible  by  the  Master  of  Peterhouse's  valuable  edition 
(3  vols.,  Cambridge,  1905-7),  there  is  a  fairly  large  variety;  but  nothing 
requires  special  prosodic  notice,  except,  perhaps,  the  curious  combination  of 
metres  in  the  unfinished  "Tracy,"  which  starts  with  rather  un-Spenserian 
Spenserians,  has  a  couplet  body,  and  a  rhyme-royal  tail.  Bysshe  and 
Johnson  would  have  shaken  their  heads  at  this  unequal  yoking  of  the  elect 
couplet  and  the  uncircumcised  stanzas.  Some  would  assign  to  Dryden  a 
larger  influence,  in  respect  of  couplet,  over  Crabbe  than  may  seem  to  be 
admitted  here.  It  undoubtedly  exists,  especially  in  his  better  passages,  but 
not,  I  think,  to  the  same  extent  as  Pope's  generally.  He  does,  however, 
use  the  Alexandrine  with  some  freedom. 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  467 

metaphorical  sense  ;  and  Crabbe  took  his  Pope  to  some 
extent  prosodically  through  Johnson.  The  actual  revising 
of  The  Village  could  hardly  fail  to  leave  its  mark,  as  in 
the  case  of  Goldsmith  ;  but  the  influence  and  principles 
of  Johnson  impressed  themselves  so  widely,  in  the  im- 
palpable fashion  to  which  we  have  often  drawn  attention, 
that  the  mere  drilling,  in  the  case  of  one  poem,  was  not 
probably  the  whole  source  of  resemblance.  When  Crabbe 
is  in  his  trivial  moods,  so  happily  and  hardly  to  excess 
parodied  in  Rejected  Addresses,  the  Popian  and  Johnsonian 
antithesis  brings  out  the  triviality.  When  he  is  more 
weighty  the  Johnsonian  emphasis  helps  to  communicate 
the  weight  In  his  few  finest  passages — that  splendid 
autumn  picture  in  "  Delay  has  Danger,"  which  has 
united  the  mightiest  suffrages,  and  others — he  does  not 
alter  the  form  of  the  couplet  much.  But  the  crease- 
arrangement  which  has  just  achieved  the  unpardonable 
distich — 

We  saw  my  Lord,  and  Lady  Jane  was  there, 
And  said  to  Johnson  :  "Johnson,  take  a  chair," 

positively  lends  itself  to  the  added  strokes  of  gloom  and 
failure.  Not  merely  the  lines,  but  the  half-lines,  cumulate 
and  amplify  the  effect  like  fresh  weights  piled  on  a 
sufferer  under  the  peine  forte  et  dure}  But,  except  at  such 


1  Early  he  rose,  and  looked  with  many  a  sigh 
On  the  red  light  that  filled  the  eastern  sky ; 
Oft  had  he  stood  before,  alert  and  gay, 
To  hail  the  glories  of  the  new-born  day  : 
But  now  dejected,  languid,  listless,  low, 
He  saw  the  wind  upon  the  water  blow, 
And  the  cold  stream  curled  onward  as  the  gale 
From  the  pine  hill  blew  harshly  down  the  dale ; 
On  the  right  side  the  youth  a  wood  surveyed, 
With  all  its  dark  intensity  of  shade  ; 
Where  the  rough  wind  alone  was  heard  to  move, 
In  this,  the  pause  of  nature  and  of  love, 
When  now  the  young  are  reared,  and  when  the  old, 
Lost  to  the  tie  grow  negligent  and  cold — 
Far  to  the  left  he  saw  the  huts  of  men, 
Half  hid  in  mist,  that  hung  upon  the  fen  ; 
Before  him  swallows  gathering  for  the  sea, 
Took  their  shotr  nights  and  twittered  on  the  lea ; 


468  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

major  moments,  it  must  be  owned  that  the  correspondence 
of  the  ribs  of  the  worsted  stockings  is  rather  irritating 
and  painfully  suggestive  of  machine-weaving.1 
Cowper.  With  Cowper  it  is  different,  and  the  difference  is 
HIS  early  highly  interesting,  though  his  couplet  work  contains 
nothing  so  good  as  his  best  things  in  other  metres,  and 
indeed  nothing  that  can  vie  with  the  astonishing  descrip- 
tion just  quoted  from  Crabbe.  The  few  examples  in  the 
early  poems — which,  it  has  specially  to  be  remembered, 
were  all  composed  before,  and  some  much  before,  1763 — 
the  "  Lines  written  in  a  fit  of  Illness,"  and  those  on  the 
"  Death  of  Sir  William  Russell,"  give  us  absolutely 
nothing  distinctive :  they  are  fairly  smooth  and  even 
fairly,  vigorous  examples  of  the  common  type,  and  that 
is  all.  But  when,  nearly  twenty  years  later,  he  issued 
the  volume  of  1782,  the  major  part  of  which  consists 
of  couplet  poems,  a  considerable  difference  is  apparent. 
It  is  quite  plain  that  he  has  studied  Churchill,  who  was 
his  school-fellow,  whose  short  career  had  come  to  an  end 
during  Cowper's  own  period  of  eclipse,  and  whom  he 
praises  elaborately,  but  not  uncritically,  in  one  of  these 
very  poems.  His  own  ear,  however,  was  far  too  fine, 
and  his  scholarship  too  considerable,  to  imitate  or  not 
to  deplore  Churchill's  "  careless  mood "  in  "  striking  the 
lyre."  But  he,  like  Churchill,  shows  many  traces  of 
recurrence  to  Dryden  ;  he  is  rebel  to  the  Johnsonian 
influence  which  steered  back  to  Pope.  Nor  is  it  im- 
probable that  two  other  causes  worked  powerfully — his 
intense  interest  in  his  subjects,  which  made  it  impossible 

And  near  the  bean-sheaf  stood,  the  harvest  done, 
And  slowly  blackened  in  the  sickly  sun ; 
All  these  were  sad  in  nature,  or  they  took 
Sadness  from  him,  the  likeness  of  his  look, 
And  of  his  mind — he  pondered  for  a  while, 
Then  met  his  Fanny  with  a  borrowed  smile. 

1  It  is  curious  that  the  very  early  Inebriety,  though,  naturally  enough,  a 
pastiche  to  some  extent,  has  rather  more  spring  and  vigour  than  the  later 
work.  And  even  in  that  later  work  Crabbe,  who  had  an  odd  kind  of 
humour,  may  be  allowed  the  benefit  of  intentional  mock-heroic  sometimes ; 
as  perhaps  in  the  "  Lady  Jane  "  distich  itself.  For  the  blank  verse  of  Mid- 
night see  next  chapter. 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  469 

for  him  to  write  a  mere  "  copy  of  verses,"  and  that  secret 
nisus  towards  blank  verse  which  was  fortunately  to 
display  itself  later. 

At   any   rate,  these  couplet -poems,  though   the  very 
subjects  that  interested    him  have  come  to  tell    against 
them  now,  and    though  his  unpractical  and  worse  than 
academic  treatment  of  them    has    helped    to  make    the 
division  the  least  readable  part  of  his  work,  have  interest 
for  us.      Table  Talk  would  seem  to  have  meant  to  keep  Table  Talk, 
fairly  close  to  Pope  :   it  has  the  dialogue  form  that  he etc' 
affects ;     and    there    are    other    Popian    vestiges.       But 
strange  new  cadences — 

In  honour's  field  advancing  his  firm  foot — 

meet  us  almost  at  once.  The  couplet  seems  to  be 
straining  at  enjambment ;  and  the  line,  as  in 

The  fleeting  forms  of  majesty  engage 
Respect, 

does  not  hesitate  to  break  the  restraint.  Independently 
of  the  division  necessitated  by  the  interlocution,  the  whole 
structure  tends  to  the  paragraphic  ;  and  the  conversational 
form  itself  forces  the  pause  into  very  exceptional  places. 
It  is  even  in  one  instance *  (followed,  as  it  happens,  by 
an  Alexandrine)  (1.  308)  at  the  first  syllable,  though 
there  is  a  secondary  pause  at  the  fifth,  as  if  by  way  of 
apology.  And  just  before 2  there  has  been  one  at  the 
second,  without  anything  after  it  to  break  the  current  of 
the  line.  There  is  an  actual  "  prosodist  "  passage  in  this 
Table  Talk  where  for  some  forty  or  fifty  lines  (500-550) 
the  writer  sneers  at  "  creamy  smoothness,"  at 

The  clockwork  tintinnabulum  of  rhyme  ; 

while  a  little  later  comes  the  universally  known  sentence 
on  Pope — 

1  No.     His  high  mettle,  under  good  control, 

Gives  him  Olympic  speed  and  shoots  him  to  the  goal. 
(Note  the  Alexandrine.) 

2  Agreed.     But  would  you  sell  or  slay  your  horse  ? 


470  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTUR  Y  BOOK  vni 

But  he  (his  musical  finesse  was  such, 
So  nice  his  ear,  so  delicate  his  touch) 
Made  poetry  a  mere  mechanic  art, 
And  every  warbler  has  his  tune  by  heart ; 

which  may  be  almost  called  the  "  notice  to  quit "  of  the 
couplet  in  this  form. 

But  he  who  lodged  it  did  not  at  once  observe  it  for 
himself,  and  The  Progress  of  Error,  Truth,  and  the  rest 
all  employ  the  same  medium — a  couplet  which  in  the 
main  follows,  but  frets  at  and  occasionally  half  kicks 
over,  the  rules  of  "  smoothness,"  at  which  it  has  been 
mocking.  Sometimes  he  comes  closer  to  Pope,  or  at 
least  to  Young,  who  has  a  certain  premonition  of  Cowper 
in  many  ways.  Sometimes  he  goes  back  to  the  Alex- 
andrine, as  just  now  noticed,  or  at  Expostulation,  1.  499 — 

And  while  the  victim  slowly  bled  to  death, 

Upon  the  tolling  chords  rung  out  his  dying  breath, 

where  the  principle  which  Johnson  criticised  as  laid  down 
and  put  in  practice  by  Cowley,  is  evidently  followed  once 
more. 

Tirocinium.  Of  his  later  returns  to  the  style,  which  he  so  fortunately 
deserted  in  The  Task,  the  most  important  is,  of  course, 
Tirocinium,  where  it  was  well  in  place.  There  is 
absolutely  no  such  vehicle  for  regular  satire — satire 
which  is  not  merely  playful  but  which  means  business, 
which  intends  to  "  burn,  sink,  and  destroy,"  if  it  can 
— as  the  couplet.  Both — all  four,  if  we  join  Young  and 
Churchill  to  Dryden  and  Pope — of  Cowper's  masters  had 
shown  that  to  demonstration  ;  and  he  proved  himself 
one  of  the  aptest  of  their  pupils.  One-sided  and  ex- 
cessive as  the  piece  may  be  in  thought  and  purpose,  it 
is,  as  satire,  not  much  the  worse  for  that ;  and  in  form 
it  is  quite  excellent.  In  fact,  it  is  by  far  Cowper's  best 
piece  in  the  couplet  for  craftsmanship  and  adaptation  of 
means  to  ends. 

Yet  we  must  not  forget  "  My  Mother's  Picture,"  where, 
with  true  poetic  power,  he  manages  to  make  this  vehicle, 
if  not  exactly  a  "  bauble  coach,"  a  carriage  for  something 


CHAP,  i  POPE  AND  THE  LATER  COUPLET  471 

very  different  from  satire  ;  or  "  The  Needless  Alarm," 
and  others  in  which  he  brings  out  its  capacities  for 
playfulness.  "  Anti-Thelypthora,"  though  it  has  pained 
some  good  people,  is  unexceptionable  as  heroi-comic  verse 
— in  fact,  it  is  in  parts  not  inferior  to  Canning's  "  New 
Morality "  from  this  point  of  view.  "  The  Colubriad  " 
is  pure  burlesque,  and  very  excellent  burlesque  ;  but 
though  burlesque  certainly  is  sometimes  a  form  of  dis- 
sembling love,  it  was  by  no  means  the  form  that  the 
couplet  wanted  at  this  particular  time.  There  was  no 
danger  to  blank  verse  in  the  "  Lines  to  the  Immortal 
Memory  of  the  Halibut,"  for  blank  verse  was  young  and 
strong.  There  was  a  good  deal  in  "  The  Colubriad,"  for  the 
couplet  was  old  and  could  not  stand  being  unceremoniously 
handled — all  the  more  so  that  it  had  been  handled  with 
rather  too  much  ceremony.  Once  more,  all  Cowper's 
dealings  in  different  ways  with  couplet  are  "  notices  to 
quit " — except  in  its  satiric  divisions,  and  in  some  even 
of  these.  Even  in  "  My  Mother's  Picture "  one  cannot 
help  feeling  how  much  better  blank  verse,  or  stanza, 
would  have  suited  the  occasion.1 

1  This  chapter  is  so  dominated  by  Pope  that  it  may  be  better  to  give 
here,  rather  than  with  the  "  Prosodists,"  his  views  of  couplet  scansion  as 
contained  in  the  "letter  to  Cromwell"  (1710),  already  cited  sup.  (p. 

392)  :— 

"I.  As  to  the  hiatus,  it  is  certainly  to  be  avoided  as  often  as  possible  ; 
but  on  the  other  hand,  since  the  reason  of  it  is  only  for  the  sake  of  the 
numbers,  so  if,  to  avoid  it,  we  incur  another  fault  against  their  smoothness, 
methinks  the  very  end  of  that  nicety  is  destroyed  :  as  when  we  say  for 
instance, 

But  th'  old  have  int'rest  ever  in  their  view, 

to  avoid  the  hiatus  in 

The  old  have  int'rest. 

Does  not  the  ear  in  this  place  tell  us,  that  the  hiatus  is  smoother,  less  con- 
strained, and  so  preferable  to  the  caesura  ? 

"2.  I  would  except  against  all  expletives  in  verse,  as  do  before  verbs 
plural,  or  even  too  frequent  use  of  did  or  does,  to  change  the  termination  of 
the  rhyme  ;  all  these  being  against  the  usual  manner  of  speech,  and  mere 
fillers-up  of  unnecessary  syllables. 

"3.  Monosyllabic  lines,  unless  very  artfully  managed,  are  stiff,  languish- 
ing, and  hard. 

"4.  The  repeating  of  the  same  rhymes  within  four  or  six  lines  of  each 
other,  which  tire  the  ear  with  too  much  of  the  like  sound. 

"  5.   The  too  frequent  use  of  Alexandrines,  which  are  never  graceful  but 


472  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

when  there  is  some  majesty  added  to  the  verse  by  them,  or  where  there  cannot 
be  found  a  word  in  them  but  what  is  absolutely  needful. 

"  6.  Every  nice  ear  must,  I  believe,  have  observed  that  in  any  smooth 
English  verse  of  ten  syllables,  there  is  naturally  a  pause  either  at  the  fourth, 
fifth,  or  sixth  syllables ;  as  for  example,  Waller  : — 

At  the  fifth  :      Where-e'er  thy  navy  |  spreads  her  canvas  wings. 
At  the  fourth  :  Homage  to  thee  |  and  peace  to  all  she  brings. 
At  the  sixth  :     Like  tracks  of  leverets  |  in  morning  snow. 

Now  I  fancy,  that  to  preserve  an  exact  harmony  and  variety,  none  of  these 
pauses  should  be  continued  above  three  lines  together,  without  the  inter- 
position of  another ;  else  it  will  be  apt  to  weary  the  ear  with  one  continued 
tone — at  least  it  does  mine. 

"7.  It  is  not  enough  that  nothing  offends  the  ear,  that  the  verse  be,  as 
the  French  call  it,  coulant ;  but  a  good  poet  will  adapt  the  very  sounds,  as 
well  as  words,  to  the  things  he  treats  of.  So  that  there  is,  if  one  may 
express  it  so,  a  style  of  sound  ;  as  in  describing  a  gliding  stream,  the  numbers 
should  run  easy  and  flowing ;  in  describing  a  rough  torrent  or  deluge, 
sonorous  and  swelling  ;  and  so  of  the  rest." 


CHAPTER  II 

BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON 

The  meaning  of  "  after  " — Roscommon — John  Philips — Broome  and 
Fenton  —  Addison,  Watts,  and  others  —  Gay  and  Prior  — 
Thomson  —  Somerville — Armstrong — Young  —  Digression  on 
dramatic  blanks — Southerne — Congreve,  Rowe,  and  Addison 
—  Exaltation  of  the  soliloquy — Return  to  Night  Thoughts — 
Akenside — Blair — Glover — Cowper — Early  blank  verse — The 
Task — Yardley  Oak. 

THE  present  chapter  is  one  of  those  where  convenience  The  meaning 
requires,  and  real  symmetry  does  not  forbid,  that  we  ° 
should  double  back  a  little  from  the  main  stage  of  our 
Book.  But  its  title  contains,  in  a  double  sense,  the  justifi- 
cation of  this  proceeding.  All  non-dramatic  blank  verse 
that  follows  the  death  of  the  author  of  Paradise  Lost  is 
"  after  him  "  in  the  two  senses — posterior  to  him,  and 
imitated,  as  best  the  imitator  might,  from  him.  The 
remarkable  effort  of  Thomson  himself  does  not  escape 
this  description,  though  it  furnished,  not  an  independent, 
but  an  additional  and  slightly  altered  model.  From  these 
two,  and  thus  from  the  one,  descends  all  blank  non- 
dramatic  verse — of  dramatic  blanks  we  may  speak  later 
—till  quite  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  is  a 
sign  of  the  comparative  paralysis  of  poetry  during  this 
century  that  no  one  seems  to  have  thought — Young  is 
the  only  possible  exception,  and  we  shall  deal  with  him 
presently — of  adapting  afresh  from  Shakespeare  and 
others,  and  moulding  a  non-dramatic  form  different  from 
Milton's.1 

1  In   fact,  most  of  the  early  eighteenth-century  pieces  in  the  metre  are 

473 


474  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

The  idea  that  Addison's  criticism  was  necessary  before 
Milton  could  be  "  got  read,"  as  Mr.  Carlyle  used  to  say, 
has  been,  or  ought  to  have  been,  long  ago  dispelled  ;  but 
it  is  certain  that  people  were  not  in  a  hurry  to  imitate 
him.  The  exception  which  in  the  fullest  sense  proves  the 
Roscommon.  rule  here  is  that  of  Roscommon.  Not  only  did  that 
ingenious  earl  translate  the  Ars  Poetica  into  blank  verse  ; 
but  he  shocked  precisians  by  inserting,  at  the  end  of  his 
much  more  famous  Essay  on  Translated  Verse>  a  solid 
block  of  blanks,  very  oddly  paraphrased  or  abstracted 
from  the  Sixth  Book  of  Paradise  Lost  itself.  This  is  a 
sort  of  Miltonic  cento.  The  Horatian  piece  very  properly 
avoids  all  imitations  of  the  Miltonic  style,  which  could 
not  but  have  had  the  effect  of  sheer  burlesque.  But  as 
blank  verse  it  betrays  no  grasp,  on  its  author's  part,  of 
Milton's  real  secrets — pause- variation,  line -composition, 
and  architectonic  of  the  lines  when  composed.  It  is,  in- 
deed, a  strong  justification  of  the  use  of  that  couplet  which 
its  writer  had  employed,  but  discountenanced,  for  didactic 
purposes.  Roscommon,  in  fact,  falls  back  on  the  old 
"  single-mould  "  line  before  Shakespeare,1  and  as  he  has  not, 
and  could  not  with  propriety  have  had,  the  magnificence 
of  diction  which  lightens  that  mould  in  the  University 
Wits,  the  effect  is  not  exhilarating.  This  kind  of  thing, 
for  instance,  will  give  the  enemy  of  blanks  plentiful 
opportunity  to  blaspheme — 

Quintilius,  if  his  advice  were  asked, 
Would  freely  tell  you  what  you  should  correct, 
Or  if  you  could  not,  bid  you  blot  it  out, 
And  with  more  care  supply  the  vacancy. 

What  is  the  advantage  (except  perhaps  that  it  is  rather 
easier  learnt  by  heart)  of  this  over,  "  If  Quintilius  were 
asked  his  advice  he  would  freely  tell  you  what  you  should 

formally  described  not  as  "  in  blank  verse,"  but  "in  the  manner  of  Milton." 
The  chief  exercise  of  the  other  kind,  apart  from  actual  drama,  that  I  re- 
member is  Dr.  Ibbot's  Fit  of  the  Spleen  in  the  fifth  volume  of  Dodsley.  If 
this  was  the  Ibbot  who  died  in  1725,  it  is  interesting  as  being  early,  and  has 
the  additional  interest  of  being  wonderfully  bad  ;  but  it  has  no  other. 

1  The  presence  of  this  mould  may  be  traced  further  in  the  blank-verses 
of  the  eighteenth  century  right  onward  to  Cowper,  and  sometimes  in  him. 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  475 

correct ;  or  if  you  could  not,  would  bid  you  blot  it  out, 
and  supply  the  vacancy  with  more  care "  ?  The  heroic 
has  nothing  to  fear  from  a  competitor  like  this,  and  one 
ceases  to  wonder  at  the  frequent  assertion  or  insinuation 
throughout  the  succeeding  century,  that  there  is  little 
difference  between  blank  verse  and  prose.  In  the  actual 
extract,  as  will  be  seen,  there  is  none,  except  slight 
inversions  of  order,  and  an  ellipsis  or  two. 

In  fact,  there  was  some  excuse  for  the  idea  which  John  Philips. 
evidently  prevailed,  that,  except  for  dramatic  purposes, 
the  fortunes  of  blank  verse  were  practically  bound  up 
with  Milton's  gorgeous  diction,  his  peculiar  syntax,  and 
his  various  mannerisms.  The  next  attempt  to  practise  in 
it  was — perhaps  less  oddly  than  it  may  seem  at  first  sight 
— made  by  way  both  of  parody  and  of  serious  following. 
Less  than  twenty  years  after  Roscommon's,  and  thirty 
after  Milton's  death — a  year  or  two  only  after  Dryden's — 
John  Philips,  a  young  Christ  Church  man,  delighted  first 
Oxford  and  then  London  with  The  Splendid  Shilling. 
The  piece  is  certainly  good,  and,  like  all  good  parodies  of 
good  things,  rather  recommends  than  discredits  the  form 
that  it  burlesques  ;  but  it  is  puzzling  to  observe  the 
particular  direction  of  the  applause  towards  its  novelty  in 
kind.  Even  Johnson  accords  it  "  the  uncommon  merit  of 
an  original  design."  But  this  is  not  our  business.  It  is 
certain  that  Philips  was  one  of  the  numerous  and  not 
ungenerous  tribe  who  never  make  fun  of  anything  with  so 
much  zest  as  of  the  things  they  love  ;  for  he  stuck  to 
blank  verse  in  both  his  serious  poems — Blenheim  and 
Cider.  For  the  bombast  and  the  absurd  pseudo-classical 
machinery  and  mannerism  of  the  first,  he  has  been 
severely  and  in  part  deservedly,  but  perhaps  excessively, 
blamed  by  Macaulay  and  others.  Cider  is  far  better.  If 
such  things  as  Georgics  are  to  be  done  in  verse  at  all,  it 
establishes  blanks  as  an  excellent  vehicle  for  them  ;  and 
as  for  form,  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  right  to  regard 
Philips  as  a  predecessor,  and  probably  a  preceptor,  of 
Thomson. 

In  the  parody,  however,  inevitably  and  to  some  extent 


476  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  via 

legitimately — in  the  serious  poems  less  legitimately,  but 
more  damagingly, — the  defects  of  mere  imitation,  and  of 
going  to  Milton  instead  of  to  Shakespeare  for  pattern, 
are  apparent.  The  omission  of  articles  and  possessive 
pronouns  ;  inversion,  apposition,  the  arrangement  of  two 
parallel  phrases  in  the  same  line  with  epithet  preceding 
in  the  first  and  following  in  the  second,  or  vice  versa, — 
these  things  and  others  are  naturally  exaggerated.  Yet 
the  very  exaggeration  must  have  drawn  attention  to  the 
style,  and  to  the  medium  generally.  And  it  is  extremely 
well  worth  noting  that  in  the  encomiastic  fragment  printed 
by  Johnson,  from  the  pen  of  Edmund  ["  Rag "]  Smith, 
that  eccentric  and  rather  ne'er-do-well,  but  very  clever  and 
scholarly  friend  of  Addison  and  Philips  himself,  describes 
this  style  as  "very  particular,  because  he  writes  in  blank 
verse  and  lays  aside  rhyme."  So  that,  at  the  beginning 
of  the  reign  of  Anne,  to  lay  aside  rhyme  and  write  blank 
verse  was  still  "  very  particular." 

Broome  and  There  is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  Philips's  own  work, 
both  comic  and  serious,  did  something  to  diminish  that 
"  particularity  "  ;  but  there  can  be  no  doubt  likewise  that 
Addison's  criticism  of  Milton,  when  it  came,  did  even 
more  to  dispel  the  notion  that  blank  verse  was  "  too  low 
for  a  poem,  nay  for  a  paper  of  verses,"  and  that  its  sole 
justification,  even  for  drama,  was  its  similarity  to  prose. 
Further,  it  seems,  to  me  at  least,  that  the  sense,  unconscious 
it  may  be,  of  the  oppression  and  obsession  of  the  couplet, 
which  was  forcing  some  to  the  octosyllable  and  the 
anapaest,  would  necessarily  force  others  to  blank  verse. 
Before  the  century  saw  the  end  of  its  third  decade — 
indeed,  when  it  had  scarcely  completed  its  first  quarter — 
the  measure  was  further  relieved  of  the  sense  of  not 
being  "  proved  "  which  still  rested  on  it.  By  an  odd, 
but  quite  comprehensible  and  much  more  than  coincident 
coincidence,  both  Pope's  coadjutors  in  the  great  couplet 
venture  of  that  first  quarter — the  translation  of  Homer — 
relieved  or  consoled  themselves  with  blanks.  Broome,  at 
a  time  which  I  have  not  identified,  did  part  of  the  Tenth 
Book  of  the  Iliad  "  in  the  style  of  Milton."  Fenton, 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  477 

probably  much  earlier,  paraphrased  the  I4th  chapter 
of  Isaiah  in  the  metre,  and  did  "  in  Milton's  style "  the 
Eleventh  Book  of  the  Odyssey.  In  none  of  these  attempts 
is  there  much  merit ;  but  they  are  attempts. 

But  besides,  and  between,  these  larger  ventures  there  are  Addison, 
small  ones  of  which  notice  should  be  taken.  The  exact  ™*'  and 
date  of  Addison's  translation  of  part  of  the  Third  ALneid 
in  imitation  of  Milton  is  not,  I  think,  known.  But  from 
its  order  in  his  poems,  it  should  come  somewhere  between 
1701  and  1705,  which  would  be  a  probable  enough  date  ; 
for  though  it  might  be  earlier  it  could  hardly  be  later. 
It  is  not  good.  Not  only  has  he  not  succeeded  in 
catching,  or  even  it  would  seem  in  comprehending, 
Milton's  texture  of  verse,  but  even  single  lines  are  rarely 
Miltonic,  and  the  imitation  is  chiefly  confined  to  borrow- 
ings, or  not  very  clever  imitations,  of  phrase.  The  piece 
could  hardly  have  encouraged  others  to  follow  it.  In 
Watts's  remarkable  Horce  Lyricce  (see  next  chapter)  there 
are  several  blank-verse  pieces,  one  of  them  dated  1701. 
Some  may  be  even  earlier ;  while  the  whole  collection 
was  published  in  1 706,  when  one  of  its  complimentary 
introducers,  Mr.  Joseph  Standen,  had  the  audacity  to 
make  the  same  experiment.  Watts  is  happier  with  the 
measure  than  Addison  ;  and  Standen  has  caught  some- 
thing (whether  from  Milton  direct  or  from  Watts,  it  is 
difficult  to  say)  which  we  do  not  meet  commonly  else- 
where. In  fact,  I  am  not  sure  that  the  passage  of  Standen 
given  below *  is  not  better  than  anything  else  in  the 
measure  before  Thomson,  though  Watts's  "  To  Sarissa  "  is 
a  little  more  artful  and  various.  That  he  had  not  reached 
the  root  of  the  matter,  however,  is  shown  by  his  finishing 
one  of  his  verse  paragraphs  with  a  redundant  syllable. 

1    Amazed,  we  view 

The  towering  height  stupendous,  while  thou  soar'st 
Above  the  reach  of  vulgar  eyes  or  thought, 
Hymning  the  Eternal  Father  :  as  of  old, 
When  first  the  Almighty  from  the  dark  abyss 
Of  everlasting  night  and  silence  called 
The  shining  worlds  with  one  creating  word, 
And  raised  from  nothing  all  the  heavenly  hosts, 
And  with  external  glories  filled  the  void. 


478  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

In  any  case,  these  various  attempts,  though  serious  and 
not  unimportant  as  symptoms,  are  mere  "  copies  of  verses," 
Gay  and  obviously  tentative.  And  Gay's  Wine,  1708,  though  a 
Pnor.  substantive  poem,  is  not  of  great  substance.  As  Mr. 
Austin  Dobson  (I  think  quite  correctly)  says,  it  suggests 
Philips  rather  than  Milton  as  its  direct  inspirer  in  more 
than  the  title.  But  perhaps  the  most  curious  of  all  are 
the  blank -verse  experiments  of  Prior  in  the  recently 
printed 1  Longleat  Poems.  To  speak  frankly,  they  are 
curiously  bad — full  of  redundancy,  although  narrative  ; 
full  of  gasping  and  unrhythmical  movement.  But  he 
never  published  them,  and  we  do  not  know  their  date. 
If,  as  the  company  in  which  they  are  found  suggests,  they 
are  late,  he  was  evidently  trying  on  dramatic  models  (and 
not  good  ones)  rather  than  on  narrative.  But  it  is 
scarcely  fair  to  comment  unfavourably  on  mere  brouillons. 
He  had,  however,  finished  and  published,  in  not  dissimilar 
but  less  chaotic  blanks,  two  translations  of  Callimachus 
which  have,  I  believe,  found  favour  with  some  good  wits. 
I  cannot  like  them  ;  the  very  first  line — 

When  we  to  Jove  select  the  holy  victim 

has  an  awkward  stumbling  effect  which  is  constantly 
repeated  ;  and  Prior  commits  the  fault  (largely  followed,  as 
we  shall  see)  of  converting  his  Miltonic  pauses  into  abrupt 
stops,  which  break  down  the  line  instead  of  merely  keep- 
ing it  in  measure  variously  weighted.  I  sometimes  think 
he  meant,  but  did  not  dare,  hendecasyllables  throughout 
— and  that  he  had  better  have  dared  them. 

Thomson.  It  was  very  different  with  the  poem  which  James 
Thomson,  after  difficulties,  got  published  in  1726,  and 
which  was  completed  in  the  course  of  the  next  few  years. 
Winter  and  its  sister  Seasons  not  merely  established 
blank  verse,  as  Prior  and  Swift  had  established  the 
octosyllable,  and  as  the  first  of  these  had  at  least  established 
the  anapaest,  but  did  more.  They  practically  introduced  a 
new  form  of  the  metre  that  they  established.  Thomson's 
is  not,  as  all  previous  blank  verse  since  Milton  had  been, 
1  Ed.  Waller,  Cambridge,  1907. 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  479 

more  or  less  direct  imitation  of  Milton  :  new  elements 
and  features,  some  good,  some  not  so  good,  make  their 
appearance.  In  fact,  Thomson  deserves  to  rank  in  the 
genealogy  of  non-dramatic  blank  verse  between  Milton 
and  Tennyson.  Of  course,  he  does  not  achieve,  or  attempt, 
any  absolute  independence  of  his  great  exemplar.  He 
could  not  have  achieved,  and  he  was  too  wise  to  attempt. 
A  little  even  remains  of  the  "  corrupt "  following  of  Milton 
which  Philips  and  the  others  display.  Thomson's  finer 
sense  avoided,  for  the  most  part,  excessive  discarding  of 
articles  and  particles,  prodigal  apposition,  and  even  to 
some  extent,  though  to  a  less,  persistent  inversion  and 
"  geometrical "  disposition  of  phrase.  But  he  kept,  and 
even  (though  in  a  new  fashion)  exaggerated,  the  Miltonic 
buckram  and  affectation ;  while  he  had  not  the  Miltonic 
fire  to  warm  and  lighten  these  things.  But  Thomson  was 
really  a  person  of  prosodic  genius — his  double  record 
with  blank  verse  and  the  Spenserian  proves  this, — and  he 
succeeded  in  new-moulding  the  measure  in  a  way  which 
Smith  might  have  again  called  "  very  particular,"  and 
which  nearly  all  eighteenth-century  writers  of  it  followed. 
In  one  very  important  respect  he,  indeed,  comes  short ; 
and  that  is  the  management  of  the  verse-paragraph.  It 
is  not  that  he  wishes  to  neglect  it :  quite  the  contrary. 
Typographically,  he  is  very  careful  of  his  paragraph  ;  and, 
what  is  more,  he  has  invented  a  peculiar  mannerism  of 
his  own  to  distinguish  and  mark  it  off  otherwise  than 
typographically,  in  the  shape  of  the  curious  end  catch- 
lines  more  or  less  identical  in  form,  which  every  tolerably 
careful  reader  of  the  Seasons  must  have  noticed.1  But  he 
is  not  able,  as  Milton  had  been  and  as  Tennyson  was  to 
be,  to  modulate  the  whole  music  of  a  paragraph  into  a 
perfect  symphony,  and  to  make  the  reader  feel  that  its 
prosodic  career  ends  exactly  with  the  career  of  the 
thought. 

1  And  Egypt  joys  beneath  the  spreading  wave. 

And  Mecca  saddens  at  the  long  delay, 
etc.  etc.  etc. 


480  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTUR  Y  BOOK  vm 

Nor  could  he  arrange  these  symphonies  with  the  same 
gorgeous  accompaniment  of  proper-name  sound.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  he  is  a  much  more  definitely  pictorial 
poet  than  Milton  ;  and  he  makes  the  structure  of  his 
paragraphs  prosodically  subservient  to  his  pictures  with 
no  little  skill.  The  lines  are  touches  ;  they  build  up  the 
subject  to  eye,  if  not  to  ear,  and  in  order  to  do  this, 
something  more  than  the  mere  "  brick-upon-brick  "  of  the 
common  blank  verse  was  wanted.  Thomson  is  particularly 
fond  of  that  kind  of  enjambment  which  consists  in 
multiplying  full  stops  and  colons  in  the  middle  of  lines  ; l 
and  he  has  borrowed,  from  Spenser  rather  than  from 
Milton,  the  device  of  linking  one  paragraph  to  another 
with  a  "  turn  of  words."  He  likes  to  throw  up  his  verse 
with  a  monosyllable  of  some  weight  and  strength  at  the 
end ;  and  he  utilises  prosodically  the  exacter  nature- 
painting  which  in  general  poetic  history  is  his  glory,  by 
putting  the  distinctive  words  for  colour  and  shape  in 
notable  places  of  the  verse,  so  as  to  give  it  character  and 
quality.  Even  his  rather  too  distinct  "  poetic  diction,"  his 
fondness  for  the  forms  in  y,  for  heavy  Latinisms  and  the 
like,  are  definitely  defensible  as  expedients  to  get  blank 
verse  out  of  the  old  reproach  of  being  measured  prose. 

Johnson,  therefore,  was  at  least  sufficiently  justified — he 
usually  was,  save  when  some  special  disqualification  was 
present — when  he  said,  "  His  numbers,  his  pauses,  his 
diction,  are  of  his  own  growth "  ;  and  the  reference  to 
pauses  shows,  among  a  thousand  other  things,  what  a 
critic  Johnson  was  when  he  would  let  himself  be.  There 
is  nothing  more  characteristic  of  Thomson's  blank  verse 
than  its  peculiarly  broken  character.2  The  breakages  are 
not  such  as  cause  roughness,  but  such  as  hinder  continuity. 
All  good  verse  is  serpentine  ;  but  Thomson's  serpents  are 
rather  like  those  very  excellent  ones  which  are  compounded 

1  Nor  does  he  break  the  verse  quite  so  much  by  these  as  Prior  had  done 
before,  and  as  Glover  was  to  do  after  him. 

2  In  the  well-known  picture  of  the  Advent  of  the  Rain  in  Spring,  there 
are  four  full  stops  in    mid-line   out  of  six  lines  ;    in  the  Harvest    Storm 
(Autumn),  six  semicolons,  heavily  paused,  towards  the  middle  of  ten  con- 
secutive lines. 


CHAP,  a  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  481 

(for  the  use  of  childhood)  of  a  large  number  of  sections 
artfully  strung  together.  His  lines  and  sections  of  lines 
are  not  interfluent,  but  conjoined  :  the  resulting  structure 
is  a  sort  of  mosaic.  This,  with  his  peculiar  diction,  is  the 
source  of  the  artificiality  which  for  the  last  century  or  so 
has  been  charged  against  him  ;  and  there  is  a  modicum  of 
truth  in  the  charge.  But  it  is  extremely  probable  that 
these  brilliant  bits  of  verse — these  tesselations  of  marble 
of  divers  colours,  if  not  of  positive  gem-substance — did  a 
great  deal  to  reconcile  his  readers  to  the  absence  of  the 
rhyme-stroke  and  flash  ;  while  there  is  no  doubt  either, 
that  the  style  also  suited  what  his  frank  but  friendly 
critic  (who  tried  to  read  Liberty  when  it  appeared,  and 
never  tried  again)  characteristically  calls  his  "enumeration 
of  circumstantial  varieties."  Yet  even  in  Liberty — false> 
frigid,  hollow,  pedantic,  sciolist  as  it  is — such  passages  as 
the  well-known  one  on  the  Retreat  of  the  Ten  Thousand 
justify  the  unusual  mercy  which  Johnson  shows  to  this 
blank  verse. 

But,  though  undoubtedly  Thomson's  horsemanship,  to 
vary  the  metaphor,  savours  for  our  modern  taste  rather 
too  much  of  the  manege — though  he  owes  the  bit  more 
than  is  perhaps  consistent  with  absolutely  perfect  riding, 
— this  is  not  quite  invariable  with  him.  There  are 
passages,  and  a  good  number  of  them,  where,  if  he  does 
not  exactly  throw  rein  on  neck,  he  never  makes  the  curb 
ostentatiously  felt ;  and  these  constitute  a  very  agreeable 
set-off  to,  and  relaxation  from,  his  more  artificial  style. 
Nay,  more — and  it  is  in  this  that  his  merit  very  largely 
consists, — he  knows  how  to  interpose  fluent  and  unchecked 
lines  in  the  very  passages  where  break  and  check  are 
generally  prominent. 

If  it  be  said  that  even  these  reliefs  from  artificiality 
are  not  quite  artless  enough,  the  objection,  though  a  little 
ungracious,  cannot  be  met  with  a  blank  denial.  It 
may,  however,  be  demurred  to  as  excessive,  and  it  may 
be  met,  most  successfully  of  all,  by  a  consideration  of  the 
reasons  and  the  circumstances.  It  must  be  remembered 
that  it  was  Thomson's  mission — a  mission  which,  let  it 

VOL.  II  2  I 


482  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

be  also  remembered,  he  achieved,  though  perhaps,  as 
so  often,  unconsciously  enough — to  refashion  blank 
verse  so  that  it  might  assist,  in  the  graver  and  severer 
regions  of  poetry,  the  efforts  which  the  octosyllable  and 
the  anapaest  were  making  against  the  inordinate  and 
exclusive  domination  of  the  heroic  couplet.  For  this 
purpose  the  pure  Miltonic  model,  which  had  hitherto 
been  followed,  was  clearly  insufficient.  To  begin  with,  it 
required  a  Milton  to  manage  it  ;  and  anybody  who 
endeavoured  to  do  so  was  but  too  likely,  whether  he 
meant  it  or  not,  to  slip  into  a  caricature  of  a  Milton. 
Again,  it  was  almost  necessarily  bound  up  with  the 
Miltonic  diction,  which  was  by  this  time  in  parts  obsolete. 
And  for  a  third  remark,  it  might  not  unjustly  be  pro- 
nounced, like  the  first  project  of  Tennyson's  Princess^ 
too  "grand,  epic,  homicidal"  for  the  semi -pedestrian 
didactics  and  descriptions  which  the  time  wanted. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  was  the  danger,  not  only  of 
the  meanness  and  lowness  which  had  long  attached  itself 
to  the  very  idea  of  blank  verse,  but  (not  to  adopt  quite 
such  derogatory  language)  of  the  flatness  and  prosaic 
quality  which  Roscommon,  its  first  post-Miltonic  practi- 
tioner, had  actually  displayed.  On  this  side  it  was  as 
much  in  need  of  raising,  varying,  decorating,  as  on  the 
Miltonic  side  it  was  of  humanising  and  adapting  to 
miscellaneous  needs.  And  all  this  had  to  be  done  with 
due  regard  to  eighteenth-century  notions  about  poetic 
diction,  dignity,  decency,  and  the  rest  of  it. 

That  Thomson  was  immensely  assisted  by  his  nature- 
studies,  by  the  interest  which  his  landscape-painting  en- 
abled him  to  offer  to  his  readers  so  as  to  make  them  forget 
the  absence  of  their  usual  douceur  or  bonus,  rhyme,  is 
undeniable.  But  this  should  not  make  us  disregard  the 
technical  skill  which  he  showed  in  beating  out,  and 
throwing  into  system,  the  peculiar  music  of  his  verse. 
His  natural  gift  for  this — a  gift  which  in  other  times 
might  have  made  him  one  of  the  greatest  of  verse-smiths 
— is,  as  has  been  said,  shown  in  his  Spenserians,  which, 
of  all  the  numerous  imitations  of  Spenser  which  amused 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  483 

their  writers  and  annoyed  Johnson  at  this  time,  are 
simply  the  only  ones  that  come  near  the  motion  and  the 
music  of  that  Pactolus-Maeander,  the  Spenserian  river  of 
song.  The  fingering  of  the  stanza,  in  the  First  Part  of  the 
Castle  of  Indolence  especially,  is  nearly  faultless  :  it  is  the 
inferiority  of  the  lexicon  that,  whenever  the  subject 
admits  of  it,  prevents  Thomson  from  coming  quite  close 
to  his  master.  Nay,  there  are  a  few  places  where  he  is 
actually  not  far  off.1  Other  measures  he  hardly  tried  ; 
and  in  his  few  lyrics  the  curse  of  the  century,  which  we 
shall  notice  more  particularly  in  the  next  chapter,  was 
much  on  him,  especially  in  that  matter  of  diction.  Yet 
the  opening  verse  of  "  Tell  me,  thou  soul  of  her  I  love  " 
could  not  easily  be  better  in  its  own  way,  and  approaches 
a  way  better  than  its  own.  His  heroics  are  undis- 
tinguished ;  but  a  man  can  hardly  be  expected  to  distinguish 
himself  in  a  style  which  he  deliberately  declines.  And, 
in  fact,  he  needs  no  ekings  from  these  minor  performances. 
The  Spenserian  imitation  of  the  Castle  of  Indolence  would 
have  been  a  very  great  prosodic  achievement  had  it  stood 
alone,  and  it  is  still  greater  as  showing  up,  and  contrasting 
with,  the  more  independent  variation  on  Milton  in  the 
blank  verse.  But  that  blank  verse  itself,  if  it  has  not 
given  us  his  very  best  poetry,  is  certainly  his  main 
prosodic  title-deed.  It  is  great  in  performance,  and 
greater  still  in  example.  The  colour-passage2  in  the 
Newton  poem  in  particular  must  have  been,  to  every 
poet  of  that  time  and  immediately  afterwards,  who  read 

1  Especially,  of  course,  the  great  "Shepherd  of  the  Hebrid  Isles,"  but  also 
others. 

2  First  the  flaming  red 

Sprung  vivid  forth  ;  the  tawny  orange  next ; 
And  next  delicious  yellow  ;  by  whose  side 
Fell  the  kind  beams  of  all-refreshing  green. 
Then  the  pure  blue  that  swells  autumnal  skies, 
Etherial  played,  and  then  of  sadder  hue 
Emerged  the  deepened  indigo  (as  when 
The  heavy-skirted  evening  droops  with  frost), 
While  the  last  gleamings  of  refracted  light 
Died  in  the  fainting  violet  away. 

No  bad  paint-pot  to  "chuck  in  the  face  of  the  public"  when  that  public 
is  besotted  with  drab  ! 


484  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

it  with  eyes  to  see,  a  casket  of  jewels  much  richer  than 
itself,  with  the  key  in  the  lock.  The  somewhat  too  high 
stepping  pace  could  easily  be  modulated  ;  the  somewhat 
formal  and  even  rigid  diction  could  in  due  time  be 
suppled  and  simplified.  But  here  once  more  was  an 
important  metre  got  ready  for  various  poetic  uses  ;  and 
for  this  we  say  "O"  to  Jemmy  Thomson,  not  in  the 
manner  of  the  scoffer  at  Sophonisba,  but  in  that  of  Man 
Friday — who  came  into  the  world  just  seven  years  before 
Winter  made  its  appearance. 

Thomson,  when  the  subject  of  cider  came  up  in 
Autumn,  made  a  not  unnatural  reference  to  Philips  as 
the  second 

Who  nobly  durst,  in  rhyme-unfettered  verse, 
With  British  freedom  sing  the  British  song, 

thereby  ignoring  Roscommon,  but  suggesting,  not  too 
officiously,  himself  as  the  third.  But  his  own  example 
soon  made  the  keeping  of  numbered  order  impossible 
and  superfluous.  In  little  more  than  a  decade  from  the 
completion  of  the  Seasons,  three  verse-writers  obtained, 
by  dint  of  blank  verse,  a  permanent  place  in  the  history 
of  English  poetry,  and  a  fairly  prolonged  hold  on  the 
attention  of  English  readers.  These  were  Somerville, 
Armstrong,  and  Young.1  Those  who  look  only  at  the 
dates  of  The  Chase,  The  Art  of  Preserving  Health,  and 
the  Night  Thoughts,  may  think  my  order  incorrect.  But 
Armstrong  had  adopted  the  measure  in  that  early  and 
eccentric  effort  of  his  which,  as  Chalmers  observes  with 
exquisite  decency,  has  "  very  properly  been  excluded 
from  every  collection  of  poetry,"  and  which  remains  as 
an  example,  not,  it  would  seem,  of  Rabelaisian  naughti- 
ness, not  of  catchpenny  rascality,  but  of  that  strange 

1  Mallet  was,  of  course,  earlier  still,  with  his  Excursion  (1728)  and  his 
Amyntor  and  Theodora.  But  the  association  of  this  much-abused  person 
with  Thomson  was  so  intimate,  and  his  blank  verse  is  so  clearly  calqud  on 
his  friend's,  that  it  does  not  require  much  notice.  The  interest  of  the 
problem  whether  he'  or  Thomson  wrote  Rule  Britannia  is  hardly  prosodic. 
The  body  of  that  famous  piece  has  no  great  prosodic  distinction,  and  the 
effective  contrast  of  its  chorus  is  due  to  the  music. 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  485 

mixture  of  solid  perverseness  and  partial  want  of  humour 
which  marked  and  marred  the  career  of  a  man  who  was 
Thomson's  cherished  friend  in  his  youth,  and  whom  the 
Burney  girls  liked  in  his  age. 

Somerville  has  left  a  great  deal  of  work  in  other  Somerviiie. 
metres  besides  blank  verse ;  but  little  of  it  is  of  any 
value,  save  in  so  far  as  it  displays  a  certain  knack  of 
adaptation  to  any  metre — heroic  or  Pindaric,  Hudibrastic 
as  improved  by  Swift  and  Prior  (in  this  last  he  is  very 
copious),  or  some  of  the  easier  lyric  measures.  His  com- 
parative earliness  in  the  blank-verse  field  gives  him  more 
interest  here  ;  though  Johnson  would  not,  as  in  Thomson's 
case,  suspend  his  implacable  enmity  to  the  form,  and  lays 
down  the  law  that  "if  blank  verse  be  not  tumid  and 
gorgeous  it  is  crippled  prose." 

His  blank-verse  poems  are  three — The  Chase  itself;  the 
short  supplement  of  Field  Sports,  which  deals  with  falconry 
mainly  ;  and  the  burlesque  Hobbinol,  which  particularly 
displeased  the  great  lexicographer.  The  latter,  indeed, 
shows  his  usual  judgment  in  putting  his  finger  on  the 
excellence  of  shortness  in  the  Splendid  Shilling.  Perhaps 
he  did  not  see,  or,  seeing,  resented  the  fact,  that  his  own 
"  tumid  and  gorgeous  "  prescription  constantly  lends  itself 
to  burlesque.  In  fact,  in  this  transition  stage  of  blank 
verse  one  is  never  absolutely  certain  whether  the  writers 
are  writing  seriously  or  not.  As  was  observed  above, 
there  are  passages  of  Blenheim  and  others  of  Cider  which 
read  to  us  nearly  as  much  like  burlesque  as  the  Shilling 
itself.  Thomson,  with  all  his  art,  is  constantly  coasting 
the  danger :  of  Armstrong  and  others  we  may  speak 
shortly.  The  Chase,  however,  escapes  this  danger  fairly. 
The  subject  is  as  well  suited  to  the  treatment  as  a 
great  part  of  Thomson's  is,  and  the  writer,  who  duly 
acknowledges  Thomson's  precedence,  has  very  fairly 
assimilated  his  method.  Indeed,  in  his  opening  he 
has  followed  Thomson's  "  broken  style,"  to  Johnson's 
displeasure — 

The  Chase  I  sing ;  Hounds  and  the  various  breed, 
And  no  less  various  use.     O  thou  great  Prince,  etc. 


486 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 


BOOK  VI 1 1 


Johnson  thought  these  "  bad,"  being  no  doubt  disgusted 
at  the  trochee  after  the  first  pause.1 

But  Somerville,  at  least,  never  actually  caricatured 
this  style  except  when  he  meant  to  do  so.  Whether  as 

Armstrong,  much  can  be  said  of  Armstrong  is  not  certain.2  The 
subject  of  his  tabooed  poem  is  so  essentially  heroi-comic 
that  the  amount  of  intentional  burlesque  in  it  is  quite 
impossible  to  decide.  But  there  is  at  least  no  probability 
that  he  meant  any  in  The  Art  of  Preserving  Health, 
though  he  certainly  seems  to  us  to  have  achieved  it.  In 
diction,  at  any  rate,  the  famous  "  gelid  cistern,"  and  other 
things,  are  at  once  the  evidence  and  the  obloquy  of  the 
"tumid  and  gorgeous"  conception  of  blank -verse  style, 
while  in  construction  the  "  broken  "  system  of  Thomson 
is  pursued  throughout. 

Young.  With  Young  the  case  is  altered.     Young  was  a  very 

odd  person  in  many  ways,  and  he  still  awaits  thorough 
critical  examination.  When,  at  the  age  of  at  least  sixty, 
he  began  to  compose  the  Night  Thoughts  in  blank  verse, 
he  had  almost  run  the  gamut  of  the  poetic  forms  of  his 
day.  He  had  written  full-dress  heroics  in  The  Last  Day, 
and  had  written  them  not  ill ;  he  had  written  satiric 
heroics  in  The  Universal  Passion,  practically  before  Pope, 
and  had  done  things  in  them  that  Pope  was  scarcely  to 
excel.  He  laid  himself  out  to  write  various  kinds  of  lyric 
— trying  dangerous  short  measures  in  The  Ocean,  not 
much  -  improved  long  ones  in  Imperium  Pelagi.  And 
what  is  more  important  to  our  present  purpose,  he  had 
been  a  not  unsuccessful  tragic  dramatist. 

It  is  this  last  exercise  which  reflects  itself  in  the  blank 
verse  of  the  Night  Thoughts,  as  everybody  calls  it,  though 
its  head-title  is  really  The  Complaint. 

Digression  on         it  may  therefore  be  proper  here,  and  indeed  almost 

dramatic  .  ,.    ,  ..  -111 

blanks.  necessary,  to  interpose  a  slight  account  of  dramatic  blank 

1  The  blank  verse  of  Dyer,  whose  very  different  Grongar  Hill  is  noticed 
below  (p.  532),  is  almost  wholly  Thomsonian,  and  needs  no  special  notice. 

2  He  seems — but  rather  late,  and  as  afterthought  when  he  saw  his  mistake 
— to  have  claimed  burlesque  intention  for  his  ptcht  de  jeunesse.     But  any  one 
who  can  see  much  difference  between  it  and  the  Art  in  this  respect  must  have 
an  even  finer  eye  for  distinctions  than  Scythrop  had  for  consequences. 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  487 

verse  between  Dryden's  return  to  it  and  Young's  famous 
"  lucubrations,"  as  somebody  once  called  them.  We  saw 
how  Dryden  himself,  supporting  his  usual  craftsmanship 
with  a  study  not  merely  of  the  older  dramatists  but  of 
Milton  (whose  verse,  independently  of  his  known  admira- 
tion for  it,  he  must  have  come  to  know  pretty  closely  in 
"  tagging "  The  State  of  Innocence],  elaborated  a  form, 
inferior  indeed  to  that  of  the  giant  race,  but  at  its  best 
very  good.  It  is  probable  that  his  contemporaries  owed 
as  much  to  him  in  this  respect  as  in  most  others.  Crowne 
is  best  at  the  heroic,  but  he  can  write  blank  verse  of 
this  second-growth  kind  fairly.  Lee  is  sometimes  almost 
magnificent,  but  inclined  to  the  bombastic  ;  and  Otway  is 
by  turns  bombastic  and  mean — indeed,  the  weakness  of  its 
blank  verse  is  one  of  the  main  faults  of  Venice  Preserved. 
Southerne,  who  was  actually  alive  when  the  Night  Southeme. 
Thoughts  appeared,  may  perhaps  be  recommended,  as 
well  as  any  one,  for  a  study  of  the  late  seventeenth- 
century  dramatic  kind  outside  of  Dryden.  It  is  rather  an 
interesting  study,  but  only  the  result  of  it  must  be  given 
here.  Southerne's  verse  is  rarely  contemptible  either  from 
frigidity  or  bathos.  Isabella,  and  Oroonoko,  and  The  Fate 
of  Capua,  and  The  Spartan  Dame,  and  the  rest,  employ  a 
very  respectable  kind  of  versification,  but  one  which 
neither  exhilarates  nor  saddens,  nor  indeed  affects  in  any 
particular  way.  You  feel  that  the  writer  is  using  verse 
instead  of  prose,  just  as  he  might  at  the  present  day  wear 
a  frock-coat  instead  of  a  jacket  on  occasions  of  ceremony. 
It  is  not  a  badly  cut  frock-coat :  it  is  of  tolerable  broad- 
cloth and  decently  brushed.  But  as  for  "  sceptred  palls," 
and  that  sort  of  thing,  you  may  look  elsewhere. 

The  famous  passage  which  Johnson  so  overpraised,  Congreve, 
though  he  did  not  mispraise  it  quite  to  the  same  extent 
as  is  generally  believed,  will  suffice  for  Congreve  :  it  is, 
indeed,  a  fair  "  copy  of  verses  "  in  the  dramatic  descriptive 
style,  but  not  much  more.  And  Rowe,  despite  his  pretty 
minute  study  of  Shakespeare  and  his  peculiar  "  intro- 
mittings  "  with  Massinger,  is  rather  behind  Southerne  as  a 
blank-verse  smith.  In  particular,  he  falls  constantly  into 


488  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

that  clumsy  use  of  the  redundant  syllable  to  which  all 
periods  of  bad  blank  verse  are  prone  when  they  do  not 
reject  it  altogether.  And  then  there  is  the  great  Mr. 
Addison's  Cato,  which  was  in  Young's  and  everybody's 
hands,  and  to  which  the  author  of  The  Revenge  and  Night 
Thoughts  had  contributed  complimentary  verses. 

It  is  to  be  feared  that  it  is  not  in  everybody's  hands 
now  ;  but  portions  and  parcels  of  it  still  must  or  should 
be  known.  Even  an  age  which  is  rapidly  forgetting  all 
letters  probably  has  a  dim  inkling  of 

big  with  the  fate 
Of  Cato  and  of  Rome, 

and  of 

'Tis  not  in  mortals  to  command  success  ; 

But  we'll  do  more,  Sempronius,  we'll  deserve  it — 

(of  which  it  has  been  justly  said  that  the  position  of  the 
verbs  would  have  been  more  really  modest  and  not  much 
less  true  if  reversed)  ;  and  above  all,  how  Plato,  if  not 
Cato,  "  reasoned  well."  Indeed,  this  last  passage,  of  some 
substance,  may  call  for  a  few  comments.  It  is,  no  doubt, 
a  fine  piece  of  work  ;  but  independently  of  general 
artificiality  there  is  a  curious  prosodic  note  of  unreality 
about  it.  In  the  first  part  the  redundant  syllables  are 
accumulated  as  if  to  disguise  the  "  Drang  nach  couplet "  ; 
in  the  second,  where  the  lines  are  strict,  they  seem  to  cry 
for  rhyme.  The  sense  is  in  distichs,  with  a  triplet  at  the 
end  ;  the  pauses  are  mostly  central ;  the  verses  quiver  for 
their  absent  tips. 

Exaltation  of         There  is  a  point  in  connection  with  this  famous  Cato 

oquy'  speech  which  is  of  great  importance,  not  only  as  regards 

Return  to      Young's  plays,  but  as  regards  the  Night   Thoughts  them- 

Thoughts.       selves.      If  any  one  will  think  of  the  matter,  it  will  probably 

strike    him    as   odd    that    not   merely   the   most   famous 

passage,  from  a  literary  point  of  view,  in   Cato,  but  the 

acme   of  the   fable  itself,  is   couched    in    the  form    of  a 

soliloquy.     Shakespeare's  soliloquies  may  contain  some  of 

the  greatest  poetry  in  his  plays,  and  they  are  all-important 

in  the  task  of  drawing  character  ;  but,  generally  at  least, 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  489 

they  take  the  place  of  choruses,  explaining,  completing, 
commenting  on  the  action,  but  not  constituting  it.  Here, 
it  is  evident,  the  case  is  altered.  And  as  a  result  of  the 
alteration,  the  soliloquy  comes  to  occupy,  with  blank-verse 
writers — dramatic  first,  then  non-dramatic — an  altogether 
disproportionate  place  ;  and  its  style,  as  they  understand  it, 
becomes  the  general  style  of  blank  verse  itself.  Certainly 
the  Night  Thoughts  consist  of  one  enormous  chain  of 
such  soliloquies — of  travestied  and  prosaised  series  of  "  To 
be  or  not  to  be "  and  "  If  'twere  done  when  'tis  done." 
This  gives  us,  as  is  well  known,  fine  passages  now  and 
then  ;  but  it  is  far  less  favourable  than  the  Thomsonian 
description  and  cataloguing  to  the  development  of  the 
full  powers  of  the  metre  ;  and  it  gives  to  the  whole  an 
unreality  which  is  fatal  to  any  such  development.  In 
fact,  not  a  night-thought  but  a  nightmare  suggests  itself 
of  a  play  still  more  enormous  still, — a  play  dwarfing 
mediaeval  and  Chinese  entertainments — from  which  all 
this  should  have  been  cut  out  and  the  parts  which  justified 
its  existence  thrown  away.1 

A  little  more  analysis,  however,  may  be  given  to  this 
remarkable  variety  of  the  great  English  measure,  not  only 
because  its  very  great  popularity  (now,  I  suppose,  absolutely 
decayed)  had  much  to  do  with  popularising  the  measure 
itself,  but  because  it  is  really  cunous.  One  thing  notice- 
able at  once  is  that  Young,  however  strong  the  dramatic 
influence  may  be  on  him,  avoids  the  redundant  syllable, 
the  unskilful  use  of  which  was  once  more  ruining  blank 
verse  with  dramatists.2  Another  is  that  he  exhibits  a 
kind  of  return  to  the  single-moulded  form,  though  he  by 
no  means  refuses  enjambment  as  far  as  sense  goes.  And 

1  Although  sad  experience,  dearly  bought  if  not  dear,  would  enable  me 
to  write  a  good  deal  on  eighteenth-century  tragedy,  I  cannot  think  it  neces- 
sary.    Johnson's  Irene  is  the  only  other  piece  that  may  insist  on  notice.      Its 
versification  is  exactly  what  might  be  expected  from  its  author's  expressed 
opinions  on  verse  in  general,  and  blank  verse  in  particular.      It  is  ornate  in 
diction,  careful  and  even  deliberately  varied  in  form  ;  but  really  monotonous 
and  fatiguing  to  the  reader  from  the  very  fact  that  it  has  obviously  been  a  piece 
of  fatigue-duty  to  the  writer. 

2  The  amazing  Lillo  when  he  tries  it  (George   Bamwell  is  in  prose,  with 
only  a  drop  or  two  into  verse)  cannot  get  on  without  redundancy. 


490  THE  EIGHTEEN!^  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

though  he  no  doubt  intended  no  trisyllabic  feet,  he  is 
rather  fond  of  those  words  which  give  the  real  trisyllabic, 
or,  as  Shenstone  (perhaps  about  the  same  time)  called 
it,  "  dactylic "  effect,  while  saving  the  countenance  of 
eighteenth-century  prudery  by  an  appearance  of  elision. 
His  pauses  are  fairly  frequent,  but,  like  Thomson's,  they 
are  rather  more  rhetorical  than  poetical — induced  by  the 
simple  close  of  a  sentence  or  a  clause,  or  by  a  special 
stress  of  argument  or  illustration,  rather  than  by  rhythmi- 
cal necessity  or  beauty.  In  fact,  sometimes,  and  indeed 
rather  frequently,  he  has  a  succession  of  these  rhetorical 
pauses,  in  or  near  the  middle  of  the  line,  which  has  a  very 
teasing  and  disturbing  effect.  He  is  rather  fond  of 
alliteration,  of  "turns  of  words,"  and  other  mechanical 
or  semi-mechanical  devices  of  the  kind.  As  a  matter  of 
course,  the  rhetorical  interrogation  and  interjection  are 
among  his  most  constant  aids.  If  it  were  not  for  the 
perpetual  false  emphasis  (the  older  editions  are  half 
italics,  and  in  a  way  these  are  in  place),  for  the  (to  us) 
glaring  artificiality,  and  for  the  incessant  monotony  of 
tone,  there  would  be  a  good  deal  to  admire  in  the  Night 
Thoughts  prosodically  as  otherwise.  As  it  is,  admiration 
of  a  kind  is  due  ;  but  "  admiration  of  a  kind  "  which  is 
felt  to  be  "  due  "  is  a  very  long  way  from  love. 
Akenside.  Something  of  the  same  curious  mixture  of  feelings  is 
excited  by  another  poet  of  this  time — it  is  unnecessary 
any  longer  to  observe  strict  chronological  order,  though  it 
must  not  be  wholly  neglected — whose  most  famous  poem 
is  in  blank  verse.  I  mean  Akenside.  I  do  not  know 
whether  the  curious  and  characteristic  praise  which 
Johnson  gives  to  him  of  having  "  fewer  artifices  of  disgust 
than  his  brethren  of  the  blank  song"  was  intended  to 
apply  to  the  first  or  to  the  last  version  of  the  Pleasures  of 
Imagination.  Akenside  was  one  of  those  poets  who  have 
a  habit  of  pulling  their  work  about.  Having  written  one 
of  the  finest  pieces  of  orthodox  couplet  verse  to  be  found 
in  the  mid-eighteenth  century — the  Epistle  to  Curio — he 
proceeded  not  exactly,  as  has  been  said,  to  transform  it 
into,  but  to  postscribe  it  with,  a  clumsy  collection  of 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  491 

awkward  stanzas  worthy  of  the  worst  Pindaric  type, 
except  that  they  are  uniform.  And  not  content  with 
correcting  the  Pleasures  (Thomson  himself  corrected  The 
Seasons  so  freely  that  I  believe  there  is  no  complete 
edition  *  of  the  variants,  though  Mr.  Logic  Robertson  has 
given  many  of  them),  he  simply  rewrote  it.  Fortunately 
both  versions  are  in  Chalmers.  The  object  of  the 
rehandling  would  appear  to  have  been  to  make  the 
verse  less  Thomsonian.  This  has  been,  to  some  extent, 
achieved  ;  but,  as  often,  and  perhaps  most  often,  happens 
in  such  cases,  without  the  attainment  of  any  very 
individual  substitute.  The  rhetorical  turn  which  is  so 
prominent  in  all  the  blank  verse  of  this  time  reaches 
its  highest  point  with  this  poet.  It  is  strong  in 
Thomson,  though  fortunately  less  so  in  The  Seasons 
than  in  Liberty ;  stronger  in  Young ;  but  strongest  in 
Akenside. 

At  the  same  time,  I  should  be  very  sorry  to  be 
thought  to  belittle  Akenside  as  a  blank-verser.  In  this 
respect,  as  in  nearly  all  others,  he  is  a  difficult  writer  to 
deal  with  ;  there  is  so  much  to  admire  in  him  and  so 
little  to  enjoy.  His  verse  recalls  that  dreadful  phrase  of 
his  own  and  at  least  two  more  generations,  "  a  fine 
woman,"  more,  I  think,  than  that  of  any  English  poet. 
As  far  as  blanks  are  concerned,  however,  it  is  very  much 
in  his  favour  that  the  second  version  of  the  Pleasures  is 
far  better  verse — less  stiff,  less  severely  Thomsonian,  than 
the  first ;  and  that  perhaps  his  very  best  work  in  the 
metre  is  to  be  found  in  the  opening  fragment  of  a  Fourth 
Book  which  is  dated  as  late  as  1770.  Here  we  are  not 
only  almost  alongside  of  Cowper,  but  very  nearly  in 
presence  of  Wordsworth  ;  and  so  have  got  hold  of  a  rope 
which  will  pass  through  the  hands,  not  indeed  of  Tenny- 
son exactly,  but  of  Shelley  and  Browning.  The  prosodic 
phrase  in  particular  is  very  remarkable,  and  strangely 
uneighteenth -century  both  in  pictorial  and  prosodic 
composition.  The  fine  woman  is,  paradoxically  and 
beatifically,  shading  off  into  a  beautiful  girl.  But 
1  One  is  said  to  have  appeared  recently  in  Germany. 


492  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

Akenside  has  always  been  to  me  a  greater  puzzle  than 
almost  any  other  English  poet. 

Blair.  The  pulpit  had  its  turn  unmixed  (for  there  is  no 

pulpit  in  Akenside,  and  a  good  deal  of  platform  in  Young) 
with  Blair's  Grave,  published  very  close  to  the  blank- 
verse  poems  of  both.  The  shortness  of  this  poem  ;  the 
inevitableness,  in  a  more  than  Wordsworthian  sense,  of  its 
subject ;  and  the  not  inconsiderable  vigour  of  its  treatment, 
secured  it  a  reputation  which  it  can  hardly  lose  whenever 
it  is  fairly  read.  For  if  the  manner  is  not  to  us  now 
congenial,  it  has  a  historic  interest  which  it  could  not 
possess  for  contemporaries.  The  handling,  from  the 
prosodic  side,  differs  curiously  from  Young's  in  the 
studied  profusion  of  redundant  syllables,  which  makes 
the  soliloquial  character  even  more  striking.1  In  fact,  The 
Grave  would  provide,  if  cut  up  into  five-and-twenty  line 
lengths  (it  has  not  quite  800  in  all),  useful  soliloquies  on 
Death  to  more  than  thirty  different  tragedies.  Yet  it  is 
noteworthy  that  the  fine  concluding  quatrain  (which  also 
purposely  or  not  ends,  stage-fashion,  with  a  couplet)  has 
no  redundancy ;  nor  have  most  of  the  best  lines.  Had 
Blair  given  himself  more  practice  he  would  probably  have 
discovered  how  dangerous  it  is  outside  of  dialogue.  But 
his  poem  is,  after  all,  but  a  highly  rhetorical  sermon  in 
verse,  addressed  almost  obviously  to  an  audience ;  and 
much  that  would  be  improper  elsewhere  is  not  so  here. 

Glover.  By  the  middle  of  the  century,  then,  and  in  fact  before 
the  deaths  of  Pope  and  Swift,  blank  verse  had  thoroughly 
established  itself — -not  for  all  kinds  of  poetry,  but  for  not 
a  few  of  the  most  popular  and  dignified.  It  was  thus  an 
even  more  formidable  rival  to  the  heroic  than  the  octo- 
syllable or  the  anapaest,  though  it  was  less  of  a  relief 
therefrom.  One  example  of  a  somewhat  different  kind 
from  any  yet  noticed,  and  challenging  the  heroic  still 
more  directly,  has  been  postponed,  because  its  author  long 

1  Blair  has  sometimes  been  thought  to  derive  in  this  respect  specially  from 
Fletcher  and  the  other  Jacobean  playwrights.  One  need  not  question  his 
knowledge  of  them.  But  I  think  it  has  been  insufficiently  noted  how  strong 
the  tendency  of  the  soliloquy,  in  Shakespeare  himself,  is  to  redundance. 


CHAP.  11  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  493 

afterwards  expanded  it  and  continued  it  with  another. 
This  was  Glover's  Leonidas,  the  first  nine  books  of  which 
appeared  more  than  a  dozen  years  indeed  after  Thomson 
had  shown  the  way,  and  seven  after  Somerville  had 
stepped  into  it,  but  as  much  before  the  almost  simul- 
taneous deliverances  of  Young,  Akenside,  and  Blair.  It 
was  not  concluded  till  more  than  thirty  years  later  ;  and 
The  Athenaid  was  posthumous.  This  latter  "stupendous 
and  terrible  "  poem  extends  to  thirty  books.  The  Spartan 
hero,  even  in  his  later  appearance,  had  contented  himself 
with  twelve  ;  but  his  books  are  individually  longer.  At 
one  time  of  my  life  I  had  a  certain  acquaintance  with 
both  ;  but  I  have  never  been  quite  sure  how  much  of  my 
remembrance  is  nightmare,  how  much  ghastly  fact.  I 
have,  however,  done  my  duty  sufficiently,  I  think,  on  the 
present  occasion  to  make  the  dream,  if  it  was  a  dream, 
reality. 

Glover  outlived  Johnson,  and  there  is  therefore  no  life 
of  him  in  the  Lives,  while  I  do  not  remember  any 
reference  in  Boswell.  This  is  a  pity,  for  it  would  have 
given  an  interesting  opening  for  a  fresh  exercise  of  the 
critic's  untiring,  though  as  we  have  seen  not  undiscrimi- 
nating,  devil's  advocacy  against  blank  verse. 

For  Glover  really  has  something  of  his  own,  though 
whether  it  is  a  good  or  a  bad  something  is  a  different 
question.  Leonidas  is  at  first,  and  could  not  but  be, 
Thomson ian  in  a  way — the  way  of  strongly  "  broken " 
verses,  short  sentences  to  make  the  breaks,  and  so  forth. 
But  the  narrative  substance  of  both  his  works  (one  may 
add  Sir  Isaac  Newton,  and  London,  or  the  Progress  of 
Commerce,  which  are  both  of  a  length  more  suited  for 
readers  of  this  world,  and  are  more  like  Thomson  in 
theme,  while  the  former  actually  repeats  a  subject  of  his) 
almost  necessitated  some  difference.  Glover  sought  or 
found  the  means  of  that  difference  in  pushing  regularity 
to  an  extreme,  and  out-Bysshing  Bysshe.1  He  prided 

1  Who  would  no  doubt  have  greatly  approved  him,  as  Pemberton  (v.  inf. 
chap,  iv.)  actually  did.  Indeed,  Glover  was  very  highly  thought  of  in  his 
day. 


494  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

himself,  we  are  told,  on  never  admitting  a  trochee  in  place 
of  an  iambus  ;  and  though  it  would  hardly  be  worth 
while  to  hunt  that  needle  through  a  hay-stack  of  more 
than  twenty  thousand  lines,  it  certainly  does  not  obtrude 
itself.  He  is  so  careful  to  block  even  the  possibility  of 
a  trisyllabic  foot,  that  he  prints  "  gen'ral,"  "  ev'ry," 
"  delib'rate."  Warton,  who  rather  admired  him,  admits 
that  he  does  not  avail  himself  of  the  great  privilege  of 
blank  verse  to  run  his  verses  into  one  another  with 
different  pauses  ;  and  that  fault  which  we  have  noticed 
in  Young — strong  breaks  without  variety — is  almost  im- 
possibly burlesqued  in  such  passages  as  this — 

Mindful  of  their  charge, 
The  chiefs  depart.      Leonidas  provides 
His  various  armour.     Agis  close  attends 
His  best  assistant.      First  a  breastplate  arms 
The  spacious  chest ; 

where  one  really  begins  to  think  that  Glover  (who  was  a 
city  man)  imagined  that  there  was  a  run  on  blank  verse, 
and  tried  to  stop  it  by  telling  the  sum  out  in  half- guineas 
slowly  on  the  counter. 

These  things  help  to  produce — though  they  might  not 
by  themselves  entirely  suffice  to  produce  it — a  general 
flatness  which  is  dully  excruciating.  Glover  is  seldom,  if 
ever,  bombastic,  as  most  of  the  other  blank-verse  writers 
of  this  time  are.  His  inversions  are  not  violent ;  nor 
does  he  often  overplay  the  cards  of  Miltonic  omission  of 
articles  or  of  apposition.  An  absolutely  absurd  single 
verse  or  phrase  is  not  very  common  with  him.  But  the 
midwife  (no  doubt  a  descendant  of  Shadwell's,  as  pro- 
phetic and  as  laconic)  had  laid  her  hand  on  his  head  at 
his  birth  and  said,  "  Be  thouyfotf  "  ;  and  except  in  Admiral 
Hosier's  Ghost  (under  what  special  disenchanting  influence 
one  does  not  know)  he  never  discredited  the  prophecy. 
His  verse  not  only  cannot  soar :  it  can  hardly  flap  its 
wings.  It  toddles  regularly  along  after  what  Johnson 
(in  another  context)  calls  "the  manner  of  the  heavier 
domestic  fowls."  When  we  look  at  its  inanity  ;  when  we 
look,  on  the  other  hand,  at  the  faults  of  the  "  tumid  and 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  495 

gorgeous  "  school, — it  is  not  surprising  that  in  the  middle 
of  the  century  the  heroic  for  a  time  shook  off  its  com- 
petitor, and  blank  verse  hardly  came  into  competition 
again  till  the  deferred  advent  of  Cowper.1 

If  the  "  Verses  written  at  Bath  on  finding  the  Heel  of  Cowper. 
a  Shoe "  were  really  Cowper's  first  original  attempt,  as 
they  seem  to  be  his  first  extant,  he  began — and  our 
poetical  knowledge  of  him  begins  in  any  case — with  the 
form  to  which,  after  abandoning  it,  he  was  to  return,  and 
in  which  he  was  to  do  his  best  work  for  bulk  and  merit 
combined.  And  though  the  subject  almost  necessitated 
the  imitation  of  Philips  and  the  burlesque  Miltonese, 
there  are  odd  anticipations  of  his  later  and  serious  style. 

This  pond'rous  heel  of  perforated  hide 

is  burlesque,  of  course,  but  it  need  not  be  ;  and  the  three 
last  lines — 

Betrayed,  deserted,  from  his  airy  height 
Headlong  he  falls  ;  and  thro'  the  rest  of  life 
Drags  the  dull  load  of  disappointment  on, 

are  not  burlesque  at  all.  They  are  good  lines  too  ;  but 
it  is  evident  that  the  writer  has  not  escaped  the  "  centri- 
petal "  habit  of  pause  induced  by  the  couplet. 

When,  half  a  lifetime  afterwards,  Lady  Austin's 
fortunate  fancy  for  blank  verse  induced  him  to  write 
The  Task  therein,  it  was  almost  inevitable  that  he  should  The  Task. 
at  least  begin  in  the  same  falsetto.  In  fact,  the  first 
batch  of  The  Sofa,  set  beside  "  The  Heel,"  shows  little 
difference  in  this  respect  But  between  the  school-boy — 
actual  or  just  emancipated — of  eighteen,  and  the  man  of 
fifty-three,  there  is,  besides  a  sad  experience  of  life,  an 
experience,  not  so  sad,  of  poetry,  his  own  as  well  as 
others  ;  and  the  range  of  his  command  of  the  instrument 

1  Crabbe's  but  recently  published  Midnight  (see  the  Master  of  Peterhouse's 
edition,  vol.  i.  p.  74,  Cambridge,  1905)  was  probably  written  earlier  than 
the  appearance  of  Cowper's  first  volume,  and  when  Cowper  had  himself 
written  nothing  but  burlesque  "blanks."  It  is  crude,  of  course,  and  rather 
too  dramatic  in  cast,  but  contains  some  fine  lines  and  verse-clauses.  It 
might  not  have  been  a  bad  thing  if  he  had  used  it  as  a  staple.  For,  as  has 
been  maintained  more  than  once,  Crabbe  was  really  rather  a  novelist  than 
a  poet. 


496  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

is  very  much  enlarged.  Although  he  has  not  yet  quite 
grasped  the  full  scope  and  reach  of  the  Miltonic  pause, 
he  is  much  less  centripetal  ;  at  any  rate  the  pendulum 
allows  itself  a  wider  swing  before  it  seeks  the  centre. 
The  worst  of  it  is  that  while  he  has  certainly  not 
attempted  to  shake  off  burlesque,  it  is  not  clear  that  he 
has  attempted  any  more  to  shake  off  the  sham  gorgeous 
style.  Cowper's  humour  is  so  gentle,  and  at  the  same 
time  so  pervading,  that  it  is  difficult  to  be  certain  on 
this  point.  But  though  it  directly  succeeds  a  passage  of 
undoubted  burla,  I  would  not  be  too  sure  that 

Oh  may  I  live  exempted  (while  I  live 
Guiltless  of  pampered  appetite  obscene} 
From  pangs  arthritic  that  infest  the  toe 
Of  libertine  excess 

is  in  the  same  case.  Armstrong,  and  even  Thomson, 
would  have  written  these  very  lines  quite  seriously  ;  and 
immediately  afterwards  there  is  no  doubt  about  the 
matter. 

For  I  have  loved  the  rural  walk  through  lanes 
Of  grassy  swarth,  close  cropt  by  nibbling  sheep, 
And  skirted  thick  with  intertexture  firm 
Of  thorny  boughs  ;  have  loved  the  rural  walk 
O'er  hills,  through  valleys,  and  by  rivers'  brink 

escapes  the  falsetto  altogether. 

It  was  this  nature-description  that  was  to  give  Cowper, 
in  a  far  greater  degree  than  that  in  which  it  had  already 
given  Thomson,  escape  from  the  buckram  prison  of 
eighteenth-century  metre  and  diction.  The  famous  land- 
scape of  the  plain  of  the  Ouse  which  follows  before  long, 
though  still  strictly  decasyllabic,  and  even  apostrophating 
words  like  "  fav'rite,"  avails  itself  of  nearly  all  the  licences 
— varied  overrunning,  shift  of  pause  or  absence  of  it 
altogether,  and  contrasted  weighting  of  line — which  the 
strict  decasyllabic  admits.  The  passage  of  the  trees — so 
interesting  to  contrast  with  Chaucer  and  Spenser — is  not 
much  further ;  but  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  recapitulate 
the  well  -  known  "  beauties  of  Cowper."  He  relapses 
into  burlesque,  and  into  that — we  cannot  call  it  in  his 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  497 

case  insincere,  but — hollow  and  unreal  tone  of  satire 
which  mars  his  couplet  poems.  But  again  and  again  he 
gets  free  ;  and  then  the  verse  gets  free  likewise.  The 
famous  pair  of  frost  pictures — the  frozen  river  and  the 
palace  of  ice, — both  admirable,  are  worth  comparing 
minutely,  in  order  to  perceive  the  greater  freedom  and 
prosodic  intricacy  of  the  seen  picture,  the  more  rhetorical 
and  artificial  beauty  of  the  read  and  fancied  one. 

But  Cowper's  greatest  blank  verse,  after  all,  is  not  yet 
It  is  to  be  found,  as  is  fitting,  in  his  greatest  poem — the 
unfinished  result  of  one  of  the  last  flashes  of  light  that 
visited  the  cottage  of  his  soul  and  kept  it  for  a  time 
from  the  power  of  Our  Lady  of  Darkness. 

Yardley  Oak  begins,  if  not  ill,  not  particularly  well,  YardUy  Oat. 
and  before  half-a-dozen  lines  are  read  we  come  upon  one 
of  the  worst  instances  of  the  worst  imitation  of  Milton's 
least  good  things — 

As  now  and  with  excoriate  forks  deform, 

a  phrase  which  (since  at  this  moment  it  is  evident  that 
there  was  not  a  fragment  of  burlesque  in  Cowper's 
intention)  confirms  the  interpretation  put  above  on  the 
"  pangs  arthritic." *  But  the  awen,  the  poetic  inspiration,  is 
too  strong  on  him  for  much  of  this  rubbish,  and  before 
the  twentieth  line  is  reached  there  opens  a  short  but 
splendid  paragraph,  which  takes  most  of  the  secrets,  not 
only  of  Milton,  but  of  Shakespeare — even,  whether  he 
•meant  it  or  not,  the  trisyllabic  foot  in  "  swallowing  "  and 
"  embryo."  There  is  a  slight  fall  for  a  few  lines,  and 
then,  at  the  fiftieth  exactly 2  there  begins  once  more  a 
magnificent  tirade,  which  anticipates  Wordsworth  not  a 

1  Cf.  below,  in  the  finest  context  of  all,  "prominent  wens  globose. " 

2      Time  made  thee  what  thou  wast,  king  of  the  woods, 
And  time  hath  made  thee  what  thou  art — a  cave 
For  owls  to  roost  in.      Once  thy  spreading  boughs 
O'erhung  the  champaign  ;  and  the  numerous  flocks 
That  grazed  it  stood  beneath  that  ample  cope 
Uncrowded,  yet  safe-sheltered  from  trie  storm. 
No  flock  frequents  thee  now.     Thou  hast  outlived 
Thy  popularity,  and  art  become 
(Unless  verse  rescue  thee  awhile)  a  thing 
Forgotten,  as  the  foliage  of  thy  youth. 

VOL.  II  2  K 


498  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

little  in  spirit,  and  excels  him  (save  in  "  Tintern  Abbey  " 
and  one  or  two  other  places)  in  form.  And  there  is 
hardly  a  descent  afterwards,  though  if  there  is  any  it 
becomes  ascent  again  in 

Thine  arms  have  left  thee.     Winds  have  rent  them  off. 

It  is  possible  that  if  Cowper  had  been  able  to  finish, 
to  revise,  and  to  print  this  great  poem,  he  might  have 
done  harm  to  it,  under  the  false  impression  that  he 
was  staying  it  with  elisions  and  comforting  it  with 
apostrophations.  But  that  does  not  at  all  matter  to  us. 
What  we  want — what  is  the  real  substance  of  our  history 
— is  not  what  people  thought  they  ought  to  do  (except 
as  a  very  minor  matter),  but  what,  under  the  joint 
influence  of  their  own  souls  and  the  time-spirit,  they  did. 
Now  what  Cowper  did  in  Yardley  Oak,  when  we  look  at  it 
in  itself  and  compare  it  with  his  earlier  blank-verse  work, 
is  clear,  and  his  own  prosodic  state  is  clear  from  it.  He 
has  long  outgrown  the  notion  that  blank  verse  is,  if  not 
essentially,  preferentially,  as  we  may  say,  burlesque  ; 
and  he  has  nearly  outgrown  the  notion  that  it  must  be 
gorgeously  stiff.  He  has  almost  entirely  given  himself 
up  to  the  "  periods  of  a  declaimer  " — to  the  system  which, 
while  retaining  the  integrity  of  the  line  to  all  reasonable 
extent,  varies  its  internal  constituents  as  much  as  possible 
in  pause  and  impetus,  and  combines  it  with  others,  by 
assumption  of  them  in  whole  or  part  into  verse-clauses. 
Of  the  greatest  secret  of  all — admixture  of  trisyllabic  feet 
— he  may  or  may  not  have  been  consciously  conscious. 
We  have  already  printed  two  of  the  Shenstonian  dactyls, 
"  swallowing  "  and  "  embryo."  We  may  add  "  veteran  "  (1. 4) ; 
"  Heaven,"  of  course,  in  trisyllabic  combination  constantly  ; 
"reverence"*  (1.  8);  "  reasoners "  *  (1.  30);  "fostering" 
0-  39)  >  "ambiguous"  (1.  43);  "recovering"*  and  "des- 
perate "  *  (11.  48,  49)  ;  "  prominent  "  (1.  65)  ;  "  to  inflict "  * 
(1.  67)  ;  "  various  "  (1.  69)  ;  "  tortuous  "  (1.  96) ;  "  rivulets  " 
(1.  113);  "millennium"  (1.  136).  And  he  has,  once  at 
least,  separated  adjective  and  substantive  at  a  line-end.1 

1  He  was  excused  the  penalties  of  dull 
Minority. 


CHAP,  ii  BLANK  VERSE  AFTER  MILTON  499 

What  matter  if  not  a  few  of  these  (those  to  which  an 
asterisk  is  affixed)  are,  as  they  appear  to  be  from  the  very 
carefully  printed  edition  of  Mr.  Milford,1  apostrophated  in 
the  MS.  ?  The  wonder  is  that  they  are  not  all  so,  for 
the  habit  had  been  ingrained  in  something  like  four  or 
five  generations.  But  some  are  not ;  some  could  hardly 
be,  by  a  poet  with  such  an  ear  as  Cowper  had.  And,  in 
any  case,  the  acute  observation  of  Shenstone  himself2 
remains  applicable.  The  poet  has  evidently  sought  those 
words  which,  play  whatever  ugly  typographical  tricks  or 
fantastic  fictions  you  like  with  them,  have  trisyllabic  value  ; 
and  it  is  by  dint  of  this,  in  combination  with  the  varia- 
tions of  pause,  the  over-  and  inter-runnings  of  line,  and 
the  rest,  that  he  recovers  the  Miltonic  effect,  and  in  fact 
differentiates  it  with  a  new  movement.  He  has  turned 
away  from  the  pond,  and  has  drunk  of  the  stream.  He 
has  not  drunk  much  :  but  others  will  drink  more.3 

1  Oxford,  1905. 

2  V.  inf.  chapter  on  "  Prosodists. " 

3  After  the  text  was  printed,  Professor  R.  H.  Case  brought  to  my  notice 
the  Fables  done  into  Measured  Prose  of  Walter  Pope  the  astronomer.     The 
quality  of  its  blank  verse  appears  to  be  pretty  accurately  designated  in  the 
title.     But  the  date  (1698)  is  early  and  interesting. 


CHAPTER    III 

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    LYRIC,    ETC. 

Preliminaries — The  Transition — Addison,  Parnell,  and  Rowe — 
Hughes — Gay — Granville,  etc. — Watts  —  Byrom — Shenstone 
—  Spenserian  imitation  —  Akenside  —  Smart  —  Collins — The 
"  Ode  to  Evening  " — The  others — Gray — The  "  Elegy  "  and  the 
minor  Odes — The  two  great  Odes,  etc. — Note,  Mason — Gold- 
smith— Cowper — Chatterton — The  Ballad — The  1723  Collec- 
tion— The  Reliques — Evans — Some  minor  lyrics — The  hymn- 
writers —  Charles  Wesley — Toplady — Cowper  again — Note  on 
latter  eighteenth-century  anapaest  and  octosyllable — Dyer  and 
Anstey. 

THE  above  heading  may  alarm  some  readers,  and  prompt 
others  to  suggest  the  celebrated  mode  of  treatment  which 
is  supposed  to  have  originated  either  with  regard  to  the 
Irish  snake  or  with  regard  to  the  Icelandic  owl.1  But 
the  one  set  should  be  consoled,  and  the  other  corrected, 
by  the  remembrance  of  three  persons  at  least — Collins, 
Gray,  and  Chatterton — who  will  fall  to  be  substantively 
mentioned  here,  though  Blake  will  be  postponed. 
Preliminaries.  Nor,  from  the  point  of  view  of  prosody,  is  even  the 
remainder  so  dry  a  biscuit  as  it  is  sometimes  thought  to 
be.  The  highest  spirit  of  poetry  is,  no  doubt,  almost 
uniformly  lacking  in  it.  But  even  so  it  is  interesting  to 
trace  the  extraordinary  intimacy  of  the  connection  of 
spirit  and  form  ;  while  in  the  history  of  the  great  prosodic 

1  It  seems  to  be  one  of  the  great  unsettled  points  of  literary  history 
whether  "There  are  no  snakes  in  Ireland"  or  "There  are  no  owls  in 
Iceland  "  is  the  original  form  of  the  chapter,  and  whether  this  form  was  due 
to  Horrebow  or  to  Van  Troil.  Some  good  men,  relying  on  Johnson,  plump 
for  Horrebow,  snakes,  and  Iceland. 

500 


CHAP.  1 1 1    EIGHTEENTH- CENTUR  Y  L  YRIC,  E TC.  501 

kinds — especially  the  common  or  ballad  measure — this 
period,  though  it  may  represent  eminently  the  "  minima  " 
of  our  title-motto,  is,  on  that  very  account,  specially 
interesting.  It  cannot  but  be  useful  to  watch,  even  if 
we  can  rather  feel  than  explain,  the  process  by  which  the 
ineffable  rhythm  of  the  seventeenth  century,  which  at 
once  sets  the  commonest  thoughts  commercing  with  the 
skies,  changed  into  the  jog-trot  hardly  caricatured  in 
Johnson's  famous  parodies,  and  seriously  exhibited  in 
this  stanza — 

Within  an  unfrequented  grove, 

As  late  I  laid  alone  ; 
A  tender  maid,  in  deep  distress, 

At  distance  made  her  moan, 

which  was  written  sometime  before  1740,  by  the 
Reverend  William  Thompson,  Fellow  of  Queen's  College, 
Oxford,  imitator  of  Spenser,  one  of  almost  the  first  flight 
of  blank-verse  writers  after  his  all  but  namesake,  etc.,  etc. 

We  saw  how  Dryden,  throughout  his  life,  managed,  The  Transi- 
partly  by  actual  poetic  survival  of  spirit,  and  partly  by  tlon* 
his  consummate  craftsmanship  in  varying  the  forms  of 
lyric,  to  preserve  some  of  its  quality  ;  and  how  a  few  of 
his  earlier  contemporaries  actually  retained,  though  in  an 
uncertain  fashion,  something  of  the  unearthly  tone  of 
the  earlier  music.  The  degradation,  though  not  yet 
quite  at  its  uttermost,  of  the  instrument,  may  be  seen 
in  a  man  like  Duke,  who  has  interspersed  his  more 
serious  work,  mainly  couplet  in  form  and  translated 
in  matter,  with  a  few  songs  not  quite  contemptible ; 
and  the  effort  to  supply  the  place  of  the  vanishing 
beauty  with  new  charms  may  be  traced  distinctly  in  Prior, 
whose  establishment  of  the  anapaest  indeed  positively 
widens  the  range  of  the  lyre.  On  the  whole,  however, 
the  lyric  of  the  latest  seventeenth  and  almost  the  whole 
eighteenth  century  steadily  flattens.  That  it,  too,  like 
blank  verse  and  like  the  octosyllable,  is  used  as  a  variation 
and  relief  from  the  couplet,  is  true  of  all  its  forms,  and 
not  merely  of  the  new  anapaestic  ;  and  this  once  more 
enforces  the  lesson  which  we  shall  gather  up  and  codify 


502  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

in  the  Interchapter.  But  poetry  does  not  change  its 
character  in  proportion  to  the  changes  of  its  position  and 
attitude.  As  in  French,  so  in  English,  the  fatal  image 
of  prose  cut  into  lengths  survives.  The  prevailing  sing- 
song does  not  help,  but  rather  intensifies,  this  effect ;  and 
nowhere  is  the  artificial  poetic  diction  of  the  century 
more  strongly  prominent.  It  is  perhaps  not  least  because 
the  necessary  biblical  phrase,  free  from  the  taint,  is 
substituted  in  religious  poetry,  that  this  poetry  acquires 
such  remarkable  relative  excellence,  and,  in  the  work  of 
Charles  Wesley,  Smart,  Cowper,  and  others,  becomes 
more  positively  poetical  than  most  of  the  profane. 
Addison,  The  process,  and  this  curious  phenomenon  in  it,  become 

Rowe  '  manifest  almost  at  once.  Addison's  verse,  couplet,  blank, 
or  lyric,  is  nowhere  very  stimulating ;  but  it  nowhere 
possesses  such  spirit  and  body,  such  throb  and  quiver, 
as  in  the  stanzaed  octosyllables  of 

The  spacious  firmament  on  high, 

and  the  modest  cadence,  not  enchanting  but  not  merely 
jog-trot,  of 

How  are  thy  servants  blest,  O  Lord  ! 
and 

The  Lord  my  pasture  shall  prepare. 

Parnell  is  mostly  Drydenian  in  his  songs  ;  but  he  too 
can  practise  something  like  the  Miltonic  (not  the  Hudi- 
brastic)  octosyllable  in  the  "  Night  Piece,"  and  the  "  Hymn 
to  Contentment,"  and  some  sacred  poems.  Rowe,  who 
has  very  little  name  for  a  poet  with  most  of  us,  keeps 
perhaps  more  prosodic  freshness  in  his  lyrics  than  most 
of  his  contemporaries. 

When  in  fair  Celia's  eyes  I  gaze, 

And  bless  their  light  divine  ; 
I  stand  confounded  with  amaze 

To  think  on  what  they  shine, 

has  something  of  the  past  swell,  the  dying  wave,  of  the 
old  Jonsonian  volume.  Side  by  side  with  it  we  find 
examples  of  the  new  tripod  anapaest,  which  Byrom  and 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  503 

Shenstone  were  to  popularise,  which  was  a  favourite 
with  the  eighteenth  century,  but  which,  even  in  Cowper's 
hands,  was  never  quite  satisfactory  till  somebody  turned 
it,  by  making  the  odd  line  hypercatalectic,  into  the  glorious 
measure  of  the  addresses  to  Araminta  and  Dolores.  The 
short-stan zaed  poem  to  Miss  Anne  Devenish,  whom  he 
afterwards  married,  is  pretty  and  uncommon  ; l  and  the 
Willow  song  is  partially  caught.  He  may  have  "  had 
no  heart "  for  Mr.  Pope  ; 2  but  he  managed  to  put  some 
into  the  prosody  of  these  songs. 

In  another  of  the  Addisonian  set,  however,  the 
degradation  of  lyric  is  much  more  strongly  exhibited. 
Although  the  members  of  the  "  little  senate "  received, 
like  those  of  others,  at  least  sufficient  salaries  of  praise, 
John  Hughes  seems  to  have  been  a  man  of  parts,  learning,  Hughes. 
and  amiability  ;  and  he  has  the  credit  of  going  outside 
stock  subjects  for  that  of  his  rather  popular  tragedy  The 
Siege  of  Damascus,  which  takes  one  of  the  most  romantic 
episodes  of  the  early  Caliphate.  But  I  cannot  say,  as 
"  L.  Buncombe  e  Coll.  Mert."  a  youthful  poet  who  died  in 
his  teens  said,  of  Hughes — 

Aonidum  decus  ille  dolorque  sororum, 

as  far  as  English  lyric  was  concerned,  though  he 
seems  to  have  been  very  prone  to  the  composition  of 
it.  He  wrote  Odes  on  the  House  of  Nassau,  in  the  half- 
regularised  Pindaric ;  others  with  less  ponderous  credentials ; 
lesser  songs  in  common  measure,  long  measure,  heroic 

1  As  on  a  summer's  day 
In  the  green  wood  shade  I  lay. 

The  maid  that  I  woed, 

As  her  fancy  moved, 
Came  walking  forth  that  way. 

By  accident  or  intention,  he  improves  on  this  lower  down  by  an  internal 
rhyme — 

Then  the  nymphs  of  our  green, 

So  trim  and  so  sheen, 

Or  the  brightest  Queen  of  May. 

2  Pope  seems  to  have  been  curiously  exercised  about  the  hearts  of  the 
Rowe  family.  He  was  also  much  shocked  at  Mrs.  Rowe  for  marrying  again 
six  years  after  her  husband's  death. 


504  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  via 

quatrains,  a  good  many  of  them  in  various  forms  for 
music.  He  even  had  the  modest  assurance  to  rearrange 
Dryden's  "  Cecilia  Major,"  and  the  more  lawful  ambition 
of  writing  masques.  Yet  in  all  this  variation  of  measure 
one  hardly  meets  one  thing  thoroughly  "hit  off"  in 
rhythm  and  cadence ;  though  they  are  all  decently 
measured  off.  Reading  him  has  made  me  think  of  a 
passage  in  The  Irish  Sketch  Book  where  "  the  waiter  holds 
up  the  bottle  and  asks  me  how  much  I'd  have."  Mr. 
Hughes  holds  up  his  verse,  and  asks  us  how  much  and 
in  what  form  we  would  have  it,  and  he  cuts  it  off  or 
pours  it  out  to  the  bespeak.  I  think  he  is  about  happiest 
in  a  not  very  common  adaptation  of  the  common 
measure.1  The  thought  and  phrase  are  commonplace 
enough  ;  but  the  measure  is  "  lifted  along "  rather  well, 
and  the  reduplication  of  the  seventh  line  sends  it  home 
gallantly.  Yet  when  by  the  accident  of  Chalmers's  com- 
pilation we  turn  a  page  or  two  and  stumble  on 

I  must  confess  I  am  untrue 
To  Gloriana's  eyes, 

noticed  before  and  written  by  Mulgrave,  a  contemporary, 
though  an  older  contemporary,  of  Hughes,  the  sense  of 
what  has  been  lost  is  itself  strangely  driven  home.  Even 
in  Congreve,  actually  one  of  the  Addison  set,  the  same 
sense  arises  :  we  hear  what  we  shall  hear  no  more. 
Gay.  To  some  readers  this  last  sentence  may  seem  hard  on 
Gay  ;  and  on  Gay  I  should  be  very  sorry  to  be  hard,  for 
I  think  that  others  have  recently  been  too  hard  on  him, 
and  he  was  always  prosodically  competent.  But  those  of 
his  continuous  metres  which  come  nearest  to  lyric — his 
famous  octosyllables — are  not  very  lyrical ;  and  his  almost 

1  The  Graces  and  the  wandering  Loves 

Are  fled  to  distant  plains, 
To  chase  the  fawns,  or  deep  in  groves 

To  wound  admiring  swains. 
With  their  bright  mistress  there  they  stray. 

She  turns  her  careless  eyes 
From  daily  triumphs  ;  yet  each  day 
Beholds  new  triumphs  in  her  way, 

And  conquers  while  she  flies. 


CHAP,  in    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  505 

equally  famous  lyrics  are  a  little  damaged  prosodically 
by  the  comment  which  his  best  and  most  competent 
living  critic,  Mr.  Austin  Dobson,  has  made  on  him — that 
he  was  a  musician.  The  fact  is — and  we  have  had 
occasion,  and  shall  have  more,  to  apply  the  distinction — 
that  there  are  certain  poems  which  are  musically  and 
certain  others  that  are  prosodically  melodious.  Some, 
no  doubt,  are  both;  but  few.  "Black-eyed  Susan,"  "  'Twas 
when  the  seas  were  roaring,"  "  Daphnis  stood  pensive  in 
the  shade,"  and  others  of  Gay's  are  of  the  former  kind. 
Everybody  knows  the  tune  of  the  first ;  I,  at  least,  do  not 
know  the  tune  of  the  two  others,  but  I  cannot  imagine  them 
without  one.  I  never  think  of  a  tune  in  connection  with 
even  Cowper's  things  ;  and  though  I  know  the  settings 
that  have  been  put  to  "  Drink  to  me  only "  and  the 
"  Night  Piece  to  Julia,"  and  other  things  of  that  kind,  the 
prosodic  music  of  their  words  is  to  me  independent  of 
them.  This  may  be  some  private  sin  or  fault,  yet  I  cannot 
help  thinking  that  there  is  a  real  difference  corresponding 
to  the  distinction  ;  and  Gay,  I  have  said,  seems  to  me 
to  be  set  on  the  further  side  by  it. 

The  useful  Chalmers  (who  should  be  more  of  a 
favourite  with  the  public  than  he  is,  I  fear)  has  again 
supplied  an  interesting  contrast  by  beginning  his  next 
volume,  after  that  which  Gay  closes,  with  Lansdowne, 
"  Granville  the  polite."  Neither  Granville's  politeness  nor  Granviiie,  etc. 
his  Toryism  had  made  Johnson  kind  to  him  as  a  poet ; 
and  I  suspect  that  the  unkindness  was  partly  due  to  a  fact, 
which,  besides  his  other  graces,  makes  me  rather  partial 
to  Lansdowne,  namely,  his  prosodic  quality.  Johnson  is 
not  very  severe  on  songs  in  The  British  Enchanters  which 
seem  to  me  rather  feeble  copies  of  Dry  den's  not  best 
manner ;  but  he  is  so  on  the  numerous  verses  to  Myra, 
afterwards  Lady  Nevvburgh,  and  long  afterwards  the 
victim  of  atrocious  lampoons,  written  by  another  Tory, 
though  rather  a  renegade  one,  Dr.  King1  of  St.  Mary 
Hall.  Whether  Myra  deserved  her  earlier  or  her  later 

1  King  had  some  skill  in  verse,  and  was  ingenious  in  Macaronic.     But  he 
is  too  dirty  for  anything. 


506  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

vates  most,  I  do  not  know  ;  but  I  do  know  that  in 
Lansdowne's  celebrations  of  her  there  is  a  faint  shadow  or 
flavour,  a  sort  of  distant  rose-scent,  of  the  cadence  and 
the  melody  of  older  days.  There  is  nothing  of  it  in 
Yalden,  who  follows;  and  in  Tickell,  who  follows  him,  there 
is  the  minus  quantity.  Tickell  was  a  really  great  hand, 
as  we  have  said,  at  the  couplet,1  and  the  famous  verse 
from  his  "  Colin  and  Lucy  " — 

I  hear  a  voice  you  cannot  hear, 

Which  says,  I  must  not  stay  ; 
I  see  a  hand  you  cannot  see, 

Which  beckons  me  away, 

may  raise  fair  expectations  of  his  lyric  in  some  gentle 
minds.  But  mere  antithesis  was  easy  to  a  coupleteer ; 
and  the  rest  of  the  piece  is  in  the  desperate  jog-trot, 
which,  after  ruining  the  gutter-ballad  of  England  earlier, 
was  at  this  very  time,  when  the  real  ballads  of  England 
and  Scotland  were  being  resuscitated,  obtaining  a  mastery 
over  both  countries  in  modern  work. 

But  the  reader  need  not  be  alarmed  ;  I  am  not  going 
to  bestow  upon  him  all  the  tediousness  for  which  I  have 
ample  notes  from  ten  mighty  volumes  of  Chalmers  him- 
self— ten  more,  though  less  mighty,  of  Dodsley  and  Pearch, 
and  I  do  not  know  how  many  of  other  collections, 
selections,  and  separate  issues.  It  was  desirable  to  sample 
regularly  at  this  junction  (or  rather  separation)  of  the  two 
centuries  ;  but  henceforward  it  will  be  better  to  con- 
centrate the  treatment  either  on  persons  who  have  a 
distinct  prosodic  importance  of  the  individual  kind,  or  on 
special  forms  illustrated  from  greater  and  smaller  people 
alike.  Of  the  former,  some  of  the  names  may  astonish, 
but  I  think  that  I  can  make  their  claims  good  without 
Watts  much  difficulty.  We  have  seen  that  Dr.  Watts  is  one 

1  The  splendid  lines  on  Cadogan,  which  caught  Thackeray's  attention — 

Thou  music,  warbling  to  the  deafen'd  ear  ; 
Thou  music,  wasted  on  the  funeral  bier, 

are  preceded  by  some  rather  literal  borrowing  from  Dryden  ;  but  both  here, 
in  the  Addison  poem,  and  elsewhere,  Tickell  is  fine.  If  he  had  been  less  so, 
Mr.  Pope  would  probably  have  been  less  angry  with  him. 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  507 

of  the  examples  of  Pindaric  eccentricity  ;  but  even  in  this 
style  he  is  far  from  technically  ineffective.  It  is  the 
ludicrous  disproportion  of  making  a  world-cataclysm  out 
of  the  death  of  a  dissenting  minister,  the  worse  than 
metaphysical  folly  of  describing  the  human  frame  as 

Arrayed  in  rosy  skin  and  decked  with  ears  and  eyes 

(as  if  it  were  one  of  the  old  paste-pigs,  with  currants  for 
these  latter  organs,  which  used  to  be  displayed  in  pastry- 
cooks' shops),  not  any  defect  of  versification,  that  makes 
Watts's  Pindarics  absurd.  His  also  noticed  blank  verse 
shows  prosodic  independence  at  least ;  and  his  lyrics 
are,  when  tried  in  the  proper  court,  not  contemptible. 
The  Moral  Songs  (which  for  some  reason  or  other  people 
will  call  Hymns)  may  be  goody  and  platitudinous,  but, 
prosodically,  they  are  very  early  and  very  deft  examples 
of  forms  that  were  by  no  means  commonplace.  "  The 
voice  of  the  sluggard "  would  have  been  a  most  early- 
rising  voice  if  it  had  complained  in  fluent  anapaests  a  few 
years  before  ;  and  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  lambs, 
and  the  rose,  and  the  Summer  Evening.  People  would 
certainly  not  laugh  at  the  measure  of  "Good  Resolutions"1 
if  it  happened  to  clothe  naughty  ones  ;  for  the  trochees 
are  most  cleverly  handled,  and  the  postponement  of  the  full 
line  to  the  second  place,  instead  of  the  commoner  arrange- 
ment of  giving  it  the  first,  is  excellent. 

The  Divine  Songs,  which  also  commonly  receive,  and 
with  more  reason,  the  name  of  Hymns,  luxuriate  less 
in  the  metrical  way.  They  are,  naturally  enough,  in  the 
three  great  recognised  hymn  measures  which,  as  we  have 
seen,  result  from  different  manipulations  of  the  aboriginal 
couplet,  the  "  Common,"  "  Short,"  and  "  Long."  And 
although  Watts  has  scarcely  the  touches  of  pure  poetry 
which  we  find  in  Charles  Wesley  and  in  Cowper,  his 

1  Though  I'm  now  in  younger  days, 

Nor  can  tell  what  shall  befall  me, 
I'll  prepare  for  every  place 
Where  my  growing  age  shall  call  me. 

This  is  "very  light  and   good,"  and  one  can  easily  imagine  a  positive 
gaillardisc  written  to  it,  and  actually  including  these  first  lines. 


508  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

handling  of  the  familiar  descants  is  far  from  despicable. 
The  later  poet  who  sang — 

The  dogs,  and  the  birds,  and  the  little  busy  bee — 
O  !  it's  all  sing-song  in  the  Watts  countree  ! 

was  not  quite  fair.  In  the  less  familiar  hymns,  the 
common  measure  keeps  its  stateliness  ;  the  long,  its  grave 
and  rolling  flow  ;  the  short,  that  quaint  variety  which, 
at  its  rare  best,  it  extracted  from  the  jog-trot  of  the 
"  poulter's." 

But  it  is  in  the  Horce  Lyric&>  Sacred  and  Profane,  that 
Watts's  prosodic  power  and  range  are  best  seen.  His 
remarks  on  the  subject,  which  will  be  quoted  in  their  due 
place,  are  as  sound  as  possible  in  principle,  though  we 
may  doubt  some  of  his  applications  ;  and  his  practice 
shows  singularly  wide  range  of  experiment.  He  even 
tried  Sapphics,1  failing,  of  course,  but  not  uninterestingly. 
Some  of  his  ode-measures  in  the  shorter  scales  are  far 
from  contemptible ;  and,  naturally  enough,  he  has  here 
more  temptation  to  bring  out  the  prosodic  qualities  (noted 
above)  of  the  three  great  sacred  measures  than  in  the 
"  Songs  for  Children."  He  is  rather  fond  of  one  of  the 
best  combinations2  of  that  fine  unit  the  quintet,  10,  10, 
10,  8,  12,  abaab,  where  it  is  one  of  the  most  agreeable  of 
minor  prosodic  studies  to  see  how  the  awkward  and  jolting 
triplet  of  Benlowes  composes  itself  into  graceful  motion 
by  the  prefixing  of  the  first  two  lines.  We  have  spoken 

1  When  the  fierce  North-wind  with  his  airy  forces 
Rears  up  the  Baltic  to  a  foaming  fury  ; 
And  the  red  lightning  with  a  storm  of  hail  comes 
Rushing  amain  down. 

These,  no  doubt,  inspired  both  in  form  and  subject  ("The  Day  of  Judg- 
ment")  Cowper's  "Hatred  and  vengeance." 

2  Happy  the  feet  that  shining  Truth  has  led 
With  her  own  hand  to  tread  the  path  she  please, 
To  see  her  native  lustre  round  her  spread 
Without  a  veil,  without  a  shade, 

All  beauty  and  all  light,  as  in  herself  she  is. 

Here  "please"  is  a  subjunctive,  and  the  rhymes  are  more  old-fashioned 
than  wrong.  The  fact  is  that  Watts,  who  was  actually  born  within  the  third 
quarter  of  the  seventeenth  century,  was  a  belated  metaphysical  who  had 
turned  to  dissenting  pedagogics.  He  is  really  worth  reading. 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  509 

of  his  blanks,  which  are  here  ;  he  can  do  the  continuous 
trochaic  dimeter  catalectic  excellently,  and  his  romance- 
sixes — a  measurer*  which  the  century  was  to  use  freely, 
with  some  fine  results,  but  more  failures — are  very  fair. 
In  short,  he  has  variety,  and  he  has  craftsmanship. 

The  agreeable  author  of  Byrom. 

God  bless  the  King — of  Church  and  State  defender, 

was  even  less  of  a  poet  in  the  highest  sense  than  Watts, 
and  he  was  most  tyrannically  voluminous.  But  he  has 
importance  for  us  in  the  fact  that,  from  the  first  occasion 
on  which  he  distinguished  himself  by  the  famous  verses, 
printed  in  the  Spectator,  on  "  Jug  "  or  Joanna  Bentley — 

My  time,  O  ye  Muses,  was  happily  spent, 

he  did  all  that  he  could  to  practise  and  popularise  the 
anapaest.  Thereby,  of  course,  he  directly  and  indirectly 
produced  a  great  deal  of  doggerel ;  but  thereby,  also,  he 
helped  to  stake  out,  embank,  and  bastion  that  fort  of 
refuge  which  we  have  described  above.  Even  in  them- 
selves, too,  the  "  Phoebe  "  verses,  the  great  history  of  the 
combat  between  Figg  and  Sutton,  and  other  poems,  are 
very  welcome,  and  Byrom  has  done  things  of  merit  in 
other  metres.  But  it  is  as  a  writer  of  the  anapaest  that 
he  concerns  us. 

He  was  wise  enough  to  use  it  mainly,  if  not  wholly,  in 
the  dimeter  or  four-foot  sizing,  which  is  its  most  natural 
arrangement  in  English.  Shenstone,  who  comes  next  on  Shenstone. 
our  list,  preferred  another  form,  which  has  been  noticed 
already,  and  made  it  extremely  popular.  For  my  own 
part,  I  do  not  share  Dr.  Johnson's  objection  to  the  crook 
and  the  pipe  and  the  kid  because  of  their  crookship  or 
pipeship  or  kidship.  But  I  do  think 

The  crook  and  the  pipe  and  the  kid 

(which  does  not  actually  occur  as  a  line,  but  might)  to  be 
rather  a  vile  metre.  In  the  first  place,  even  when  it  is 
most  pretty,  its  prettiness  is  of  the  insignificant  kind, 
which  is  worse  than  piquant  plainness  ;  in  the  second,  it 


510  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

is  horribly  monotonous  ;  and  in  the  third,  there  is  a 
peculiar  kind  of  "  ramshackleness "  about  it,  a  tendency 
to  "  come  to  pieces,"  which  excites  a  so*rt  of  petty  alarm. 
I  have  pointed  out  before  how  close  it  is  to,  and  how 
happily  genius  can  make  it  into,  one  of  the  most  glorious 
of  lyrical  measures  in  English  ;  and  the  smallness  of  the 
alteration,  with  the  astonishing  difference  of  result,  is  one 
of  the  choice  marvels  of  prosody.1  But  in  itself  I  cannot 
away  with  it ;  not  even  Cowper's  "  Catharina  "  can  induce 
me  to  grant  more  than  a  reluctant  exception  and  exemp- 
tion. The  fact  is  that  Shenstone — a  real  name,  as  we 
shall  see,  in  prosodic  theory,  a  rediscoverer  of  the  lost 
land  of  promise  and  possession — is  not  a  great  prosodist 
in  practice.  His  elegiac  quatrains  are  very  tame :  there 
are,  I  suppose,  five  hundred  of  them,  and  the  whole 
would  not  supply  small  change  for  one  of  Gray's  worst. 
Of  his  Odes,  the  best  prosodically  is  "  The  Princess 
Elizabeth,"  where  the  trochees  are  made  to  race  with 
considerable  skill ;  and  some  of  his  common  measure  has 
a  faint  far-off  echo  of  the  old  divine  music.  For  Shen- 
stone was  a  poet,  though  his  prose  shows  it  even  more 
than  his  poetry.  And  though  the  poet  cannot  do 
without  the  lyre,  the  lyre  will  generally  show  its  quality 
only  when  the  poet  touches  it. 

Spenserian  He  may  serve,  as  well  as  another,  as  a  peg  whereon  to 
hang  a  very  short  discourse  on  the  minor  Spenserian 
imitations 2  of  the  century,  which  are  so  curiously 
abundant.  No  one  of  them  comes  anywhere  near  the 
Castle  of  Indolence  in  merit ;  and  though  there  are  one  or 
two  pretty  and  well-known  things  in  Shenstone's  own 
Schoolmistress,  he  is  not  even  the  most  successful  of  the 
other  imitators  before  Beattie.3  Most  of  them,  though  to 

1  It  has  also  great  serio-comic  qualities,   discovered  and  exhibited  in 
Thackeray's  "  Chronicle  of  the  Drum." 

2  I  do  not  apologise  for  inserting  it  here ;  the  Spenserian  stanza  is  the 
most  lyrical  of  all  narrative  forms. 

3  Of  Beattie  I  would  rather  not  talk  much.     I  once  wrote  of  him  that 
"he  would  have  been  a  poet  if  he  could,"  and  I  cannot  go  any  further  now. 
But  there  is  no  doubt  that  he  was  a  most  successful  schoolmaster  to  bring 
folk  to  poetry  in  his  own  day  and  long  afterwards  ;  indeed,  I  have  been  told 
by  quite  young  people  that  Beattie  so  brought  them.     And  I  am  not  like 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  511 

a  rather  less  extent  than  those  of  Chaucer  at  this  time, 
show  very  little  sense  of  the  qualities  of  their  original. 
Under  the  singular  delusion  that  it  is  only  the  quaintness, 
not  the  music,  of  the  Spenserian  diction  that  unites  it  so 
close  to  the  verse,  they  pepper  the  words  of  Spenser  (or 
travesties  of  them)  as  hard  as  the  caster  will  let  them. 
They  have  conceived  a  still  more  singular  notion  of  his 
"  simplicity  "  (an  application  of  the  word  which  "  simply  " 
deprives  it  of  all  meaning),  and  though  they  are  not 
wrong  about  the  tenderness  in  him,  they  seem  to  be 
quite  unaware  of  the  splendour  and  the  stateliness,  the 
long-drawn  sweetness  and  elaborate  art,  which  he  displays. 
Nobody  except  Thomson  ever  gets  anywhere  near  to 
the  resonance  and  colour  of  the  stanza.  But  the  con- 
stant practice  of  it  is  still  noteworthy,  as  a  sign  of  the 
haunting  desire  for  something  different  from  the  couplet. 

The  importance  of  Akenside  in  blank  verse  has  been  Akenside. 
dealt  with  ;  but  it  recurs  in  connection  with  lyric,  and  it 
may  be  profitably  taken,  from  our  point  of  view,  in 
connection  with  that  of  another  poet,  Smart,  who,  from 
being  mainly  a  name,  has  of  late  years  become  much 
more.  Both  have  interest  in  themselves  prosodically ; 
both  have  more  when  taken  in  conjunction  (as  they  have 
not  been  always  taken)  with  Collins  and  with  Gray. 

Perhaps  to  no  one — certainly  not  to  Gray — was 
Johnson  more  unjust  than  to  Akenside,  and  perhaps 
nowhere  is  his  injustice  more  easily  accounted  for.1  He 
did  not  dislike  Akenside's  principles  in  politics  more  than 
I  do  ;  but  he  positively  hated  Akenside's  principles  in 
versification — for  which  I  have  much  tolerance.  Once 
more  we  have  the  complaint  of  "  harsh "  diction,  of  ill- 
constructed  stanzas,  of  rhymes  dissonant,  unskilfully 
disposed  or  too  far  from  each  other,  perplexing  to  the 
ear,  and  so  on.  Akenside  is  not  Milton  ;  but  it  would 

that  severe  allegorist  of  the  forties  (was  it  Bishop  Wilberforce  or  Mr. 
Adams  ?)  who  delivered  over  to  the  Black  Cherubim  a  great  teacher  of 
young  soldiers  for  not  righting  the  good  fight  himself  quite  consistently. 

1  It  has  been  duly  recorded  above  that  he  gave  a  certain  faint  praise  to 
the  blank  verse,  but  it  was  chiefly  that  he  might  point  out  what  a  poor  thing 
blank  verse  is  at  its  best. 


512  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

be  quite  worth  while  for  any  student  who  is  still  puzzled 
by  Johnson  on  Lycidas  to  read  Akenside  and  Johnson  on 
him.  The  fact,  of  course,  is  that  these  Odes  have  not 
the  regularity  of  the  couplet,  and,  moreover,  that  they 
are  resorted  to  in  order  to  get  rid  of  the  regularity  of  the 
couplet.  It  is  this  which  gives  them,  like  all  their 
fellows,  interest  for  us  ;  it  is  even  this  which  gives  them 
a  certain  merit  for  us.  But  it  could  not  be  expected  to 
give  them  either  merit  or  interest  for  Johnson,  to  whom 
the  couplet  was  actually  the  crown  and  sum  of  things 
prosodically  possible  or  desirable. 

Yet  it  was  impossible  for  Johnson  to  go  wrong 
without  also  going  right.  He  has  undoubtedly  "  fixed  " 
Akenside's  great  defect  when  he  says  that  "  his  thoughts 
are  cold " ;  and  it  would  be  difficult  to  meet  with  a 
simple  counter-denial  his  denial  to  this  poet  of  "  the  ease 
and  airiness  of  the  lighter,  the  vehemence  and  elevation 
of  the  grander  ode."  In  fact,  if  my  theory  is  right,  the 
very  fact  that  these  eighteenth-century  odists  and  lyrists 
generally  were  seeking  relief  from  the  couplet,  would 
always  be  prejudicial,  would  sometimes  be  fatal,  to  their 
complete  success.  For  the  artist  to  try  to  be  unlike 
something  or  somebody  else  is  nearly  as  cramping  and 
distorting  as  for  him  to  try  to  be  like  something  or 
somebody  else.  Your  deliberate  high  jinks,  your  organ- 
ised orgies,  are  always  rather  sad  things  ;  and  the 
lighter  and  grander  odes  of  the  eighteenth  century  are 
too  often  the  one  or  the  other.  There  is  something  of  the 
fearful  joy  of  a  barring-out  in  their  irregularities.  "  See 
how  playful — see  how  Pindaric — I  am  "  is  a  too  common 
suggestion.  Yet  Akenside  is  sometimes  very  near 
success,  as  far  as  his  measures  go.  He  is  specially  given 
to  the  romance-six  in  its  eighteenth -century  form — 
which  he  sometimes  varies  by  shifting  the  first  hexa- 
syllable  to  the  second  place, — and  others  of  his  forms  are 
further  variations  of  the  same.  It  is  almost  a  pity  that 
he  did  not  "  Pindarise  "  the  stately  blank  verse  "  Hymn  to 
the  Naiads,"  one  of  the  most  remarkable  examples  of  his 
icy  elegance.  It  could  not  have  lost  warmth  as  the 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTUR  Y  L  YRIC,  ETC.  513 

"  Curio "  Epistle  did,  for  it  has  none  to  lose  ;  and  a 
more  irregular  outline  would  have  suited  it  well.  The 
best  icebergs  and  glaciers,  I  am  told,  are  always  irregular  ; 
stalactites,1  which  Akenside  also  suggests,  certainly  are. 

For  once,  if  not  for  once  only,  furor  poeticus  actually  Smart, 
developed  out  of  furor  vulgaris  in  the  well-known  case  of 
Christopher  Smart.  The  regular  collection  of  Smart's 
poems  (to  be  found  in  Chalmers),  which  is  fairly  volu- 
minous, is  in  prosodic,  as  in  other  respects,  of  the  most 
ordinary  eighteenth-century  kind.  Some  positive  irregu- 
larities of  metre  may  be  accidental  ;  most  varieties  of 
the  popular  lighter  measures  are  treated  with  respect- 
able skill,  and  the  crambo  ballad,  with  its  Hudibrastic 
rhymes  to  "  Harriot,"  is  just  worth  noting  in  a  History 
of  Prosody.  But  in  prosodic,  as  in  other  character,  the 
Song  to  David,  which  was  actually  excluded  from  the 
orthodox  collection,  and,  though  published,  could  not  be 
found  by  the  industrious  Chalmers  (who  had  to  content 
himself  with  an  extract  from  a  review),  is  utterly  different. 
This,  again,  is  in  the  romance-six,  which,  after  the  dying 
down  of  Pindaric,  became  almost  the  "  common  measure  " 
of  Ode  during  the  century.  But  it  has  wholly  changed 
its  character.  It  shakes  off  entirely  that  original  sing- 
song which  Sir  Thopas  hit  so  unerringly  ;  it  shakes  off 
equally  the  somewhat  heavy  march  which  at  this  time  it 
commonly  affects  ;  the  subject,  of  course,  puts  the  quaint 
grace  of  Gray's  Cat-and-Goldfish  piece  out  of  question. 
But  Smart — or  rather  some  certainly  not  evil  spirit  which 
at  the  time  had  possession  of  him — has  poured  into  it  a 
flowing  fervour  of  thought  and  expression  which  com- 
pulsorily  transforms  its  motion  and  sound,  its  outline  and 
colour.  It  becomes  utterly  alive,  full  of  panting  and 
glowing  life,  throbbing  with  fervour  of  the  very  kind  that 
eighteenth-century  poetry  most  lacks.  Its  movement  is 
of  the  most  various  and  minutely  divided  character,  and 
yet  it  is  perfectly  symphonic  and  continuous  as  a  whole. 
The  dead  twigs  of  ordinary  eighteenth-century  line  and 
stave  have  become  fiery  flying  serpents — not  maleficent 

1  Cf.  Theodore  de  Banville. 
VOL.  II  2  L 


514  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  viu 

at  all,  but  dazzling  and  delightful  with  their  fire  and  their 
flight.  The  matter  of  the  Song  you  will  get  much 
better,  and  even  much  better  put,  in  Isaiah  and  David 
himself;  but  its  manner  is  its  own,  and,  for  the  time, 
unique. 

It  has  been  hinted  above  that  it  would  be  well  to  take 
Collins  and  Gray  rather  less  as  if  they  were  earth-born 
prodigies  than  has  sometimes  been  done,  and  rather  more 
as  in  connection  with  their  fellows  and  their  time.  No 
doubt  they  constitute  the  third,  as  Prior  may  be  said, 
roughly,  to  be  the  first,  and  Thomson  the  second,  of  the 
warnings  addressed  to  the  couplet.  But  the  actual  form 
of  this  warning  was  much  less  novel  than  that  of  the 
anapaestic  or  of  the  blank  -  verse  secession.  Even  the 
regularising  of  the  Pindaric  had  been  long  anticipated  by 
Congreve.  In  other  respects  there  is  little  positively  new 
of  the  prosodic  kind  in  either  poet  except  their  patterns 
and  the  spirit  of  their  fingering. 

Collins.  Collins  began  with  couplet,  and  not  very  good  couplet ; 

though  the  refrain  construction  of  the  Second  Eclogue 
already  shows  an  anima  naturaliter  lyrica.  How  that 
soul  showed  itself  in  the  handful  of  Odes  and  the  "  Fidele  " 
Song,  there  is  not  much  need  of  saying.  But  except  in 
the  unrhymed  "  Evening  "  there  is  nothing  so  very  new  in 
the  actual  form.  In  that,  no  doubt,  there  is  something  very 

The  ••  Ode  to  new.  We  shall  meet  with  this  uncovenanted  *  rhymeless- 
ness  not  seldom  ;  and  it  would  be  premature  to  discuss  it 
in  its  first  example,  which,  however,  it  may  not  be  prema- 
ture to  say,  remains  by  far  the  most  successful  ever  written. 
In  fact,  we  ought  to  be  particularly  grateful  for  it,  because 
it  shows,  with  as  little  adventitious  aid  as  possible,  how 
exquisite  Collins's  ear  was.  Yet  it  is  impossible  not  to 
think  how  much  more  beautiful  it  would  be  with  rhyme. 

The  others.  But  the  other  Odes,  which  do  not  thus  break  with  the 
usage  of  the  time,  illustrate,  from  one  side  even  more 
effectively,  the  difference  which  fresh  studies  and  individual 
gift  combined  will  produce,  in  this  as  in  other  matters. 

1  I  use  these  words  because  Campion  unrhymed  his  verse  on  an  elaborate 
covenant,  and  sometimes  at  least  with  a  definite  challenge. 


CHAP,  in    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  515 

Most  poets  since  Dryden  had  been  good  Latin  scholars, 
and  some  had  been  more  or  less  fairly  acquainted  with 
Greek.  "  Rag "  Smith  is  said  to  have  been  more  than 
fairly  so  ;  but  the  Greek  influence  is  certainly  less 
perceptible  in  any  of  them  than  the  Latin.  Collins  is 
full  of  it ;  and  its  importance,  especially  in  regard  to 
metres  of  the  choric  kind,  cannot  be  exaggerated.  More- 
over, there  was  his  own  influence — the  indefinable — work- 
ing too.  But  the  conventionality  which  had  been  and 
was  to  be  fatal  to  most  of  his  brethren  was  also,  as  the 
Eclogues  had  shown,  strong  on  him  ;  and  not  a  few  even 
of  the  Odes  show  it  The  first — that  to  "  Pity,"  in  the 
romance -six  of  which  we  have  said  so  much — is  the 
queerest  jumble  conceivable  of  tags  of  Monmouth  Street 
expression — "  scene,"  "  turtles,"  "  British  shell "  (which  does 
not  in  the  least  mean  a  larger  edition  of  what  the  British 
grenadier  carried  in  his  pouch),  and  so  forth.  But  there 
is  something  in  its  cadences  which  is  not  as  the  Yaldens  or 
even  as  the  Akensides.  "  Fear,"  with  its  Epode  stuck  in 
the  middle,  is  even  a  wilder  jumble,  with  the  pent-up 
music  still  struggling  to  get  free ;  while  "  Simplicity " 
seems  to  drug  itself  with  a  quasi-Miltonic  regularity.  But 
the  lyric  scheme  of  the  "  Poetic  Character "  insists  on 
being  attended  to ;  it  is  not,  like  the  usual  eighteenth- 
century  strophe  and  stanza,  a  congeries  of  lines  with  little 
individual  and  less  symphonic  harmony.  "  Mercy "  is 
doubtful.  But  who  shall  overpraise  the  opening  strophe  of 
"  Liberty  "  as  poetry  or  as  prosody  ?  Its  substance  is,  if 
not  exactly  naught,  naught  better  than  Akenside.  But  its 
form  abolishes  the  substance  ;  for  we  know  that  only  the 
chosen  ones — the  aristocracy,  or  for  the  special  occasion 
the  monarchy,  of  poetical  man — can  so  write.  "  Liberty  " 
to  write  like  that,  will  enable  no  one  to  write  like  it. 

Patriotism  shall  protect  the  shade  of  Colonel  Ross 
from  critical  remarks  of  any  kind,  and  the  golden  hair 
of  Peace  in  her  turn  shall  be  borne  swift  from  our  grasp. 
Nor  were  it  mannerly  to  say  much  of  "  The  Manners." 
But  "  The  Passions  "  and  "  The  Death  of  Thomson  "  and 
the  "  Popular  Superstitions  of  the  Highlands  "  and  "Fidele," 


516  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

— who  that  has  any  sense  of  the  music  of  words  can  speak 
unbribed  of  these?  Perhaps  the  famous  first  is  not 
improved  by  its  having  been  written  directly  for  setting  ; 
as  in  all  pieces  of  the  kind,  from  Dryden's  downwards, 
the  transitions  and  variations  are  sometimes  not  strictly 
prosodic,  but  tampered  with  to  suit  the  composer's  con- 
venience. In  all,  the  conventional  diction  appears,  and 
we  could  no  doubt  do  with  less  Personification  ;  though 
I  rather  doubt  whether  Personification  is  so  deadly  as 
the  first  Romantic  school  thought.  But  in  all  the  four 
that  command  over  words  to  make  them  musical,  that 
fingering,  that  vivifying  of  dead  schemes  into  live  measures 
which  is  what  we  are  questing  for  through  this  long 
history,  makes  its  appearance.  The  symphonic  variety  of 
the  "  Passions "  ;  the  ineffable  sweetness  of  the  octo- 
syllabic quatrain  in  the  "  Thomson  "  and  "  Fidele  "  ;  the 
stately  decasyllabics,  woven  into  statelier  stanzas,  of  the 
"  Highlands," — we  may  go  far  indeed  in  the  eighteenth 
century — we  may  travel  indeed  from  its  China  to  its  Peru 
— without  finding  such  prosodic  delights  in  diction  and 
measure  together.  Add  "  Evening,"  add  the  incompar- 
able "  How  sleep  the  brave  "  ;  and  one  may  say  "  If  Fate 
had  not  bound  him  ;  if  he  had  improved  on  these  Odes 
as  they  improve  on  the  Eclogues ;  if  he  had  shed  the  stock 
diction  and  phrase  as  he  had  tuned  up  the  stock  metre, 
what  might  not  Collins  have  done  ? " 

Gray.  Gray  has  nothing  like  this  prosodic  witchery  ;  but  he 

is,  here  as  elsewhere,  a  very  great  artist.     The  magnificent 

praise  which  Johnson,  captious  as  he  may  have  been  about 

other  things,  has  given  to  the  substance  of  the  "  Elegy  " 

might  almost  be  repeated  of  its  form.      The  difficulty  of 

the  decasyllabic  quatrain  has  been  dwelt  upon  before  in 

these  pages.    Gray  has  not  only  surmounted  that  difficulty  ; 

he  has  not  only  got  something  uniformly  good  out  of  the 

metre,  but  he  has  made  it  uniquely  good.      Nothing  like  it 

(i  had  been  done  before  (voyezplutot  the  egregious  Hammond), 

and  themhior  and   everything    since,  approaching    the    kind,  has   been 

Odes.  imitated  from  Gray.      He  that  reads  it,  to  keep  close  to 

Johnson's  admirable  phrase,  persuades  himself  that  this  must 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  517 

have  been  what  the  stanza  was  meant  for.  Dryden  had  tried 
to  make  it  splendid,  and  even  his  magnificent  craftsman- 
ship had,  on  the  whole,  failed.  He,  and  Davenant  and 
others  had  tried  to  make  it  subservient  to  narrative  ;  and 
it  had  refused  to  be  so  made.  Hammond  and  the  rest 
had  tried  to  make  it  graceful,  dainty,  what  not ;  and  the 
lame  foot  of  Failure  had  kept  up  with  them  easily  enough. 
Gray  first  caught  its  curious  faculty  for  subduedness — for 
minor  keys  of  thought,  emotion,  description — and  brought 
this  faculty  out  without  a  false  note  from  first  to  last.  This 
sense  of  what  measures  can  do,  and  this  knack  of  making 
them  do  it,  distinguish  him  throughout.  His  minor  Odes 
do  in  the  same  measures  what  all  the  other  eighteenth- 
century  odes  come  short  of  doing.  Some  people  whom  I 
revere  do  not  like  "  the  pensive  Selima  "  ;  from  Johnson's 
criticism  one  would  conclude  that  he  did  not.  It  seems 
to  me  perfect.  But  it  is  perfect  as  a  caricature  of  the 
eighteenth  century  itself;  and  it  is  quite  possible  that 
Johnson  saw,  did  not  choose  to  see,  and  did  choose  to 
punish,  that. 

As  for  the  two  great  regularised  Pindarics,  the  John-  The  two  great 
sonian  criticism  about  the  stanza  being  too  long,  and  the  OdeSl  etc- 
ear  being  kept  waiting  for  its  pleasure,  is,  of  course,  merely 
the  aeternum  vulnus  of  the  slighted  couplet.  There  is 
nothing  like  leather,  and  this  is  not  leather.  No  such 
objection  will  be  made  here,  and  undoubtedly  there  are 
many  fine  prosodic  phrases  in  the  pair.  But  the  extreme 
artificiality  of  the  diction  is  far  more  seldom  melted  or 
veiled  by  a  real  rush  of  melodiously  adjusted  sound  ; 
and  the  adjustments  themselves  partake  too  much  of 
artifice.  It  is  by  no  means  certain  that  Gray's  best 
work,  prosodically,  is  not  the  simple  and  beautiful 
"  Vicissitude."  The  virtue,  again,  of  the  Norse  transla- 
tions and  imitations  lies  in  their  imagery  and  dramatis 
persona  much  more  than  in  their  metre  ;  and  though  the 
Long  Story  is  worthy  of  Prior,  and  has  touches  that  are 
not  in  Prior,  these  touches  are  not  metrical.  Those  who 
cannot  distinguish  may  be  shocked  at  Gray  not  being 
put  higher  here  ;  his  position  will  not,  I  think,  be  shock- 


5i8  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

ing  to  those  who  can.  He  did  great  work  ;  but  with  the 
exceptions  noted,  and  one  to  be  added  presently,  it  was 
not  done  in  our  division.  Indeed,  in  part  of  our  division 
— that  which  concerns  Diction — his  work  was  very 
dubiously  good  ;  for  in  few  eighteenth-century  poets  is 
this  stiffer  and  more  artificial  than  in  Gray.  But  the 
final  regularising  of  the  irregular  Ode,1  and  the  marvellous 
modulation  of  the  quatrain,  remain  to  his  credit ;  while 
he  is  almost  wholly  an  anti-coupleteer.2 

Goldsmith.  We  should  have  dealt  almost  sufficiently  with  Gold- 
smith as  an  example  and  pillar  of  the  quasi -reaction 
towards  the  couplet.  There  is  no  doubt  that  a  great 
support  was  given  to  this  by  the  Traveller  and  the 
Deserted  Village,  reinforcing  as  they  did,  with  a  lighter 
and  brighter  variation,  the  magnificent  character  of  the 
Vanity  of  Human  Wishes.  And  both  in  them  and  in  the 
minor  poems  there  is  noticeable  a  suppleness  of  prosodic 
gift  which  has  often  distinguished  Irish  poets.  In  the 
days  when  I  used  to  review  minor  poetry  by  the  measured 
cubic  foot,  I  nearly  always  found  that  volumes  by  Irish 
writers,  though  they  might  not  be  in  the  least  superior  as 
poetry,  could  "  rhyme  and  rattle  "  much  more  deftly  than 
the  others.  The  anapaests  of  "  The  Haunch  of  Venison  " 
and  "  Retaliation  "  are  not  only  the  best  since  Prior,  but 
are  perhaps  more  regularly  good  than  Prior's  longer 
copies — certainly  than  "Down  Hall."  "The  Hermit" 
has  terrors,  but  we  shall  talk  of  them  under  the  head  of 
the  ballad ;  and  it  may  be  observed  that  in  the  brief 
common  measure  song — 

The  wretch  condemned  from  Life  to  part, 

1  And  whether  this  is  altogether  "  to  credit "  may  be  seriously  doubted. 
The  original  Greek  choric  arrangement  is  magnificent,  just  as  the  minor 
Greek  arrangements  of  Sapphic  and  Alcaic  are  exquisite ;  but,  for  all  that, 
neither  the  one  nor  the  other  need  suit  English. 

Mason.  2  This  does  not  mean  that  he  could  not  or  did  not  write  couplets.     His 

"  very  ineligible  friend,"  Mr.  Mason,  one  of  the  paltriest  and  most  preten- 
tious poetasters  who  ever  trespassed  on  the  English  Parnassus,  need  not 
delay  us  long.  His  couplets  are  tinsel ;  his  blank  verse  is  wood  ;  his  Hudi- 
brastics  are  straw ;  and  his  odes  are  plaster.  Four  good  lines  stand  to 
Mason's  name  at  the  end  of  twelve  bad  ones  in  the  epitaph  on  his  wife  in 
Bristol  Cathedral,  and  these  four  lines  are  Gray's. 


CHAP,  in    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  519 

these  terrors  are  quite  absent.  His  Hudibrastics  are  at 
least  good  ;  and  the  jog-trot  which  he  can  hardly  have 
meant  in  "  Edwin  and  Angelina "  comes  in  well  in 
the  "Mad  Dog"  elegy  and  "Madam  Blaize."  In  fact, 
all  the  smaller  pieces  are  prosodically  adequate  and  more  ; 
while  the  anapaests  are  prosodically  consummate  in  the 
lighter  kind,  and  do  not  attempt  any  other. 

Cowper,  the  last  poet  of  the  exclusively  English  Cowper. 
eighteenth  century,  and  by  the  facts  of  his  unhappy 
history  representing  a  singular  combination  of  different 
time-influences,  is  not  less  interesting  prosodically  than 
otherwise,  even  if  we  leave  out  of  sight  the  blank  verse 
formerly  noticed.  He  is  not  like  Chatterton  (y.  inf.}  and 
Blake  (who  published,  the  one  before,  the  other  contem- 
poraneously with  him),  a  nineteenth -century  poet  ante- 
dated ;  nor  has  he,  like  Smart,  been  taken  up,  not  exactly 
into  the  seventh  heaven,  but  well  into  the  first,  by  the 
inspiration  of  insanity.1  Insanity,  alas  !  was  only  coming 
in  its  final  stage  when  he  wrote  the  greatest  of  all  his 
lyrics  ;  and  it  was  the  insanity  that  quenches,  not  that 
gives,  poetry,  and  hope,  and  life.  But  he  was,  like  Collins 
and  like  Gray,  an  eighteenth -century  poet  in  whom 
there  were  germs  of  something  not  eighteenth-century  ; 
and  the  half  development  of  these  germs  affected  his 
lyric  not  less  than  his  blank  verse,  even  at  its  latest  and 
greatest  development.  Many  of  his  best  things,  if  not 
all,  are  in  the  ordinary  and  popular  eighteenth-century 
metres  ;  but  in  nearly  every  case  he  manages  to  give 
them,  if  not  an  entirely  new  turn  and  life  (he  sometimes 
does  this),  at  any  rate  the  best  life  and  the  best  turns. 
Scores  of  poets  had  practised  the  trochaic  dimeter  cata- 
lectic,  and  had  fitted  it  for  a  range  of  epithets  extending 
upwards  from  trivial  to  beautiful.  He  took  it  for 
"  Boadicea,"  and  made  it  magnificent.  "  John  Gilpin," 
besides  its  more  commonly  recognised  charms,  is  one  of 
the  best  examples  of  the  happy  faculty  which  the  century 
possessed  of  burlesquing  itself.  "  The  Royal  George," 

1  It  was  in  the  early  stages  of  this  that  he  wrote  the  Sapphics  referred  to 
under  Watts. 


520  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

effective  as  it  is,  is  a  little  uncertain  in  its  metre  ;  but  its 
best  stanzas  are  almost  up  to  "  Boadicea  "  in  movement. 
Those  naughty  lines  which  mystified  poor  Lady  Austin, 
and  which  (though  certainly  a  man  between  two  ladies — 
both  widows,  too  ! — is  in  a  terrible  quandary)  seem  to 
show  that  "  William's  "  subsequent  account  of  the  trans- 
action was  one  of  his  few  derogations  from  an  otherwise 
stainless  gentlemanhood — 

The  star  that  beams  on  Anna's  breast, — 

recover  for  common  measure  much  of  its  ancient  soar.  He 
nearly  succeeded  in  raising  to  something  better  the 
rickety  jingle  of  the  anapaestic  three-foot  without  re- 
dundance. The  beauty  of  his  best  hymn-measures  is 
unquestioned.  And,  finally,  the  splendid  and  terrible 
"  Castaway "  is  one  of  those  examples  (the  singling  out 
and  characterising  of  which  is  one  of  the  pleasures  of 
writing  such  a  book  as  this)  which  get  out  of  particular 
measures,  on  one  particular  side  at  least  (for  the  facets  of 
some  measures  are  numerous,  if  not  infinite),  almost 
everything  that  this  side  can  give.  When  one  reads  these 
steady,  hopeless  staves  —  accomplished,  but  not  finical; 
carefully  subdued,  but  not  to  any  extravagant  point ; 
reminding  one  of  the  stories  of  men  who  have  dressed 
themselves,  not  foppishly,  but  with  especial  neatness, 
before  committing  suicide — it  seems  as  if  superficially 
calm  despair  could  take  no  other  form — as  if  this  measure 
were  "  quoted  and  signed  "  for  the  utterance  of  Wanhope. 
It  is  perhaps  so  fated.  Bishop  King's  famous  "  Tell  me 
no  more,"  though  far  less  gloomy,  is  despairing  too. 
But  in  many  other  examples  there  is  nothing  of  this  ; 
and  none  but  a  great  prosodist  could  have  found  it  out 
and  declared  it,  for  the  world  to  shudder  at,  if  it  be 
in  shuddering  mood — to  wonder  at,  if  it  knows  how  to 
wonder. 

Chatterton.  I  have  kept  Chatterton  to  the  last  single  mention  for 
several  reasons.  He  could  not,  considering  that  all  his 
work  was  over  and  done  thirty  years  before  the  century 
closed,  be  reserved,  like  Blake  and  Burns,  for  the  next 


CHAP,  in    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  521 

volume.  And  there  is  the  additional  argument  against 
doing  so  that,  in  his  non-Rowleian  poems,  he  is,  prosodi- 
cally  as  in  other  respects,  simply  the  most  ordinary  of 
eighteenth-century  hobbledehoy  poetasters.  Nowhere,  in 
the  vast  deserts  of  this  verse,  is  a  stretch  so  utterly 
bare  of  oasis  as  the  "  Poems  in  the  Modern  Style." 
Hardly  anywhere  is  there  such  an  interesting,  though 
such  a  bewitched  and  bewitching  oasis,  as  the  "  Rowley  " 
poems  themselves.  The  desert,  no  doubt,  has  made 
some  irruption  with  its  sands  even  here  ;  but  it  is 
astonishing  how  the  return,  however  clandestine  and 
however  ill-guided,1  to  the  founts  of  the  older  English 
has  refreshed  matters  prosodically  and  otherwise. 

The  most  interesting  thing  for  us  by  far  is  the  way  in 
which  Chatterton  learnt  from  Spenser — it  could  hardly 
by  any  possibility  have  been  from  any  one  else — the 
great  Christabel  variation  itself  in  "  The  Unknown 
Knight "  or  "  The  Tournament"  It  begins  with  pretty 
steady  iambics,  one  shortened  line — 

With  manie  a  tassild  spear, 

giving  an  effect  which  is  not  Christabellian,  though  it 
does  foreshadow  the  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,  and  may 
have  been  in  Scott's  mind.  But  so  far  no  other  feet  have 
been  beyond  risk  of  doubt  or  question  allowed,  though 
there  have  been  some  of  Shenstone's  "  dactyls,"  "  clarion," 
"champion,"  etc.  After  some  thirty  lines,  Chatterton 
breaks  into  anapaests,  and  before  long  he  has  felt  the 
true  intermixture.2  He  does  not  quite  hold  it,  stumbling 
into  decasyllabics.3  But  it  is  noteworthy,  and  of  the 

1  If  Chatterton  took  liberties,  liberties  far  more  unjustifiable  have  been 
taken  with  him.  The  publishing  of  the  Rowley  poems  as  wholes  in  modern 
spelling,  and  the  "improving"  of  them  by  original  emendation,  or  even  by 
moving  gloss  into  text,  are  both  things  to  be  contemplated  with  amazement. 

2  But  when  he  threwe  downe  his  asenglave, 
Next  came  in  syr  Botelier  bold  and  brave, 
The  death  of  manie  a  Saraceen,  etc. 

3  So  great  the  shock  their  senses  did  depart. 

This  has  led  to  a  theory,  as  to  Spenser's  own  practice,  which  will  be  best 
discussed  when  we  come  to  Christabel  itself. 


522  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  via 

noteworthiest,  that  Spenser  had  done  the  same:  and  most 
*  of  the  piece  is  very  fair,  if  accidental,  Christabel.  Nor 
should  notice  be  omitted  of  the  strange  fact  that  while 
both  Coleridge  and  Scott  could  hardly  have  failed  to  know 
Chatterton,  yet  neither  of  them  refers  to  him.  There 
is  no  other  single  feature  in  the  Rowley  poems  of  such 
importance,  so  striking,  or  so  strange  ;  but  the  breath  of 
a  new  prosodic  inspiration  blows  at  intervals  through  the 
whole  of  it,  and  more  than  atones  for  the  preposterous 
misspelling  and  the  "  marine  store "  jumble  of  real, 
mistaken,  and  manufactured  archaisms.  The  intervals 
are  sometimes  trying,  as  where  poor  John  Lydgate  (who, 
as  Heaven  and  we  know,  has  prosodic  sins  enough  of  his 
own)  is  saddled  with  eighteenth-century  doggerel  common 
measure,  of  which,  before  the  sixteenth,  there  is  no  trace 
in  English.  Rowleyfied  Pindaric  is  also  rather  terrible  ; 
and  clumsy  stanzas  suggesting  a  sort  of  hotch-potch  of 
the  Spenserian,  Prior's  ugly  variety  of  it,  and  the  octave, 
are  not  much  better.  But  some  short  regular  lyrics  are 
breath  from  Heaven. 

I  kenne  syr  Roger  from  afar 

Trippynge  over  the  lea  ; 
Ich  ask  whie  the  loverds  son 

Is  moe  than  mee  ? 

should  make  any  ear  that  deserves  to  hear  prick  itself  up. 
And  as  for  the  great  "  Minstrel's  Song  in  ^Ella,"  this, 
once  more,  is  one  of  the  chief  and  principal  things — one 
of  the  turning  points — of  our  story. 

The  remarkable  thing  about  this *  is  the  almost  un- 
erring skill  with  which  the  variations  of  the  metre  are 
adapted,  and  the  still  more  wonderful  judgment  with 
which  the  vowel  values  adjust  themselves.  One  of  the 
improvers  upon  Chatterton,  neglecting  the  latter  point, 

1  O  !  synge  untoe  mie  roundelaie, 

O  !  droppe  the  brynie  teare  wythe  mee, 
Daunce  ne  moe  atte  hallie  dale, 
Lycke  a  reyning  ryver  bee  ; 

Mie  love  ys  deade, 

Gon  to  hys  deathe-bedde 

Al  under  the  wyllowe  tree. 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  523 

has  actually  substituted  the  feeble  word  "  gird "  for 
"  dente  "  in  one  stanza,  and  the  perfectly  different  "  grow  " 
and  "  blow "  for  "  gre  "  and  "  bee "  in  another.  Such 
experiments  chiefly  show  the  need  of  inculcating  the 
true  principles  of  prosody,  and  its  absolute  dependence 
on  individual  cadence  and  sound. 

The  stanza  and  the  song  just  given  are  Chatterton's 
greatest  prosodic  feats,  and  those  of  which  one  thinks 
most  fondly  as  one  visits  or  revisits  the  mighty  church 
that  inspired  him,  on  its  knoll  looking  half  down  upon,  half 
up  to,  Bristol  city.  But  the  prosodic  afflatus  is  all  over 
the  Rowley  poems.  The  "  Ballad  of  Charity,"  in  subject 
a  rather  common-place  though  beautifully  varied  version 
of  the  Parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan,  is  the  first  resurrec- 
tion for  many  a  day  of  rhyme-royal  with  an  Alexandrine 
ending.  It  has  not  a  few  charmingly  moulded  lines,  and 
there  are  many  to  be  found  elsewhere.  At  any  rate,  here 
once  more  is  "  fingering  " — the  touch  of  string  and  stop 
which  turns  line  and  stave  from  dead  things  to  live  ones 
— that  makes  the  clay  birds  take  wing  and  sweep  and 
flutter  and  cry.  And  so  "  Glory  !  Glory  !  " — as  Salvation 
Yeo  (who  must  have  seen  St.  Mary  Redclyffe  often 
enough,  though  it  is  to  be  feared  not  with  the  proper 
feelings)  has  it  of  the  discovery  of  another  ocean  by 
Englishmen. 

This  chapter,  however,  would  be  incomplete  without  The  ballad. 
a  survey  of  the  part  played  by  the  ballad  during  the 
century — a  part  which  is  of  the  very  highest  prosodic 
importance,  though  of  the  least  intricate.  It  will  even 
be  better  still  to  reserve  the  directer  and  greater  part  of 
the  Scottish  element  to  take  together  with  Burns  in  the 
next  volume,  only  reminding  the  reader  in  the  interim, 
that  Watson's  collections  when  the  century  was  quite 
young,  and  those  of  Allan  Ramsay  a  little  later,  un- 
doubtedly exercised  great  influence  ;  that  Allan  himself 
was  in  communication  with  Pope,  Somerville,  and  other 
English  poets  ;  and  that  Scotland,  through  Lord  Hailes, 
had  a  finger  even  in  Percy's  Reliques.  It  will  be  sufficient 
here  to  give  the  history,  during  the  century,  of  the  English 


524  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

ballad  as  written  or  collected  by  Englishmen  in  the 
narrow  sense,  or  men  resident  in  the  South,  no  matter 
from  what  part  of  the  kingdom  they  drew  their  extraction. 
At  the  beginning  of  the  time  this  English  ballad  was 
at  its  absolute  nadir  as  regards  literary  reputation  ;  and 
in  the  Garlands  and  other  collections,  as  well  as  in 
broadsheet  form,  had  to  a  large  extent  deserved  that 
position.  But  there  must  have  been  a  stirring  of  the 
waters  somewhat  far  back  in  the  seventeenth  century  ; 
since  the  inestimable  Percy  Folio  is  attributed  to  about 
its  middle,  and  we  know  that  not  very  long  after  that 
middle,  Pepys  began  to  make  his  collections,  and  others 
theirs.  And  according  to  the  operation  of  that  mysterious 
but  comfortable  law  of  which  the  oldest  expression  is 
found  in  one  of  our  own  documents — 

When  bale  is  best,  then  bote  is  nest, 

and  which  we  have  seen  prosodically  illustrated  through- 
out these  two  last  Books,  the  ballad  began  to  exhibit  its 
lifebuoy  properties  just  when  English  prosody  generally 
seemed  settling  towards  elaborately  but  monotonously 
The  1723  rhythmed  prose.  The  first  Collection  of  Old  Ballads 
n>  corrected  from  the  best  and  most  ancient  Copies  extant 
appeared  in  1723,  three  years  before  D'Urfey's  Pills  to 
Purge  Melancholy,  which  in  a  way  may  be  called  the 
second,  though  it  contains  much  other  matter.  The 
earlier  collection  is  attributed  to  "  Namby  Pamby " 
Philips,  and  if  it  be  his,  is  by  far  his  greatest  literary 
work,  estating  him  in  a  position  much  above  that  of 
writers  of  better  original  verse.  And  it  is  not  insignifi- 
cant that  it  has  a  motto  from  Rowe,  defending  ballad 
writers  from  the  obloquy  generally  thrown  on  them. 
One  must  not,  of  course,  expect  in  this  collection  any 
attempt  to  criticise  or  sort  the  wheat  from  the  tares  ;  it 
was,  in  fact,  much  better  that  there  should  be  none,  for 
it  would  probably  have  proceeded  on  a  wrong  method. 
The  historical  introductions  are  now  historical  curiosities 
mainly ;  and  the  illustrations  much  the  same.  As  all 
the  pieces,  no  doubt,  were  taken  from  printed  copies, 


CHAV.  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  525 

the  singsong  and  jog-trot  which  had  invaded  and 
mastered  the  ballad  during  the  past  two  centuries  are 
triumphantly  in  evidence.  But  this  need  not  disturb  us. 
In  his  first  volume,  taking  it  alone,  Namby  gave  them 
the  "  King  and  the  Miller  of  Mansfield,"  divers  "  Robin 
Hood"  pieces,  "Chevy  Chase,"  "Sir  Andrew  Barton," 
"  Johnny  Armstrong's  Goodnight,"  "  Lord  Thomas  and 
Fair  Ellinor,"  "  Gilderoy  "  ;  he  gave  them  such  verse  as — 

Queen  Elenor  was  a  sick  woman 

And  afraid  that  she  should  die, 
Then  she  sent  for  two  Friars  of  France 

To  speak  with  her  stealthily, 

which,  for  all  the  abominable  libel  of  which  it  is  going 
to  be  the  vehicle,  has  virtue  enough  to  take  Bysshe  and 
all  Bysshism  on  its  sinful  shoulders  and  carry  them  off 
to  their  own  place.  And  again  and  again  in  the  two 
others  you  come  to  measures  every  one  of  which,  while 
it  knocks  the  fetters  off  the  feet  of  English  poetry,  teaches 
those  feet  at  the  same  time  how  to  run  freely.  Here 
are  the  well-stamped  coranto  of  the  "  Spanish  Lady,"  the 
swinging  anapaests  of  "  Pretty  Bessee,"  the  floating  lilt 
of  "  The  Lass  with  the  Golden  Hair."  No  matter  about 
good  text  or  bad  text ;  no  matter  about  incongruous 
admixtures  and  prosaic  degradations.  The  circles  which 
arise  when  you  cast  stones  like  these  into  the  waters 
will  widen  and  widen  till  they  cover  the  whole  pool. 

It  is  tempting,  but  would  be  improper,  to  dwell  further 
on  individual  instances  of  influence.  The  next  important 
point  de  repere  is  Percy's  book  itself.  Here,  too,  one  has 
to  keep  the  foot  carefully,  in  order  not  to  stray  into 
general  poetic  influence  ;  but  it  can  be  kept.  And  let  us 
remember  also,  that  it  does  not,  for  our  purpose,  matter 
one  scrap  how  Percy  doctored  and  blended  his  material. 
What  he  gave  to  his  age  is  the  point.  The  gift  was 
certainly  a  mighty  one — meddle  and  make  as  he  might, 
he  could  hardly  mar  worse  than  the  seventeenth-century 
ballad-mongers  had  done  ;  and  his  contributions  to  the 
education  of  the  reading  were  all-important.  His  "  Chevy 


526  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

Chase  "  is  no  longer  the  castrated  and  translated  version 
which  Namby  had  given,  but 

The  Percy  out  of  Northumberland, 

with  the  real  swing  and  sweep  ;  and  the  same  is  the  case 
with  many  another,  if  not  with  all  others.  The  exact 
age,  the  real  genuineness  of  his  pieces,  have  really  nothing 
to  do  with  the  importance  of  the  fact,  for  us,  that  they 
came  before  the  generation  of  1765.  The  numerous 
variations  of  the  ballad  measure  itself  must  have  been 
priceless  as  tending  to  disturb  the  deadly  singsong 
which,  as  we  have  seen,  had  settled  on  it.  No  matter 
who  wrote  "  Sir  Patrick  Spens,"  no  matter  where  and 
when  it  was  written  :  it  could  not  but  be  antidote  to  the 
bane  of  Percy's  own  ballad  style.  The  zigzag  and  the 
discordia  concors  of  "Edward"  must  have  been  sovereign 
for  eighteenth-century  complaints.  The  Lewes  Ballad 
itself  was  there — a  document  of  which  then  hardly  any 
one  could  be  expected  to  understand  the  full  significance, 
but  which  was  at  any  rate  put  on  record  and  exposed  to 
access.  "  The  Nut-Brown  Mayd "  reappeared  without 
the  obliging  but  ill-parted  companion  to  which  Prior 
had  yoked  her.  "  The  Heir  of  Lynne,"  again,  whatever 
questions  may  be  raised  about  it,  stirs  and  enlivens  the 
dead  bones  of  the  long  measure,  just  as  other  examples 
do  those  of  the  short.  The  admirable  cadence  of  "  Mary 
Ambree  "  varies  "  Pretty  Bessee  "  exactly  in  the  difference 
of  the  spirit  of  the  two  young  ladies  ;  and  "  Brave  Lord 
Willoughby  "  in  the  same  way  teaches  that  lesson  which 
(it  is  to  be  hoped  not  quite  ad  nauseam}  we  have  so 
often  urged  here,  that  the  possible  fingerings  of  the  same 
measure  are  in  many  cases  almost  infinite.  Even  allitera- 
tive metre  this  admirable  Doctor  exhibited  to  his  fortunate 
patients,  though  it  is  not  probable  that  many  of  them 
assimilated  the  medicine  ;  and  he  selected  some  of  not 
the  least  beautiful  of  seventeenth-century  compositions 
to  temper  and  complete  this  his  exhibition  of  English 
poetry  and  English  prosody.  Many  hard  things  have 
been  said  of  Percy,  sometimes  by  pedants,  sometimes  by 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTUR  Y  L  YRIC,  ETC.  527 

persons  for  whom  that  word  itself  would  be  too  hard,  but 
who  for  the  occasion  were  made  somewhat  pedantic  by 
special  interests  and  special  studies.  To  any  one  who 
judges  from  the  general  point  of  view  of  literature,  he 
must  always  seem  one  of  the  most  profitable  servants  that 
this  literature  has  ever  had  :  and  fortunately  our  special 
interest  and  subject  only  intensify  appreciation  of  his  work. 

Still  there  is  no  doubt  that  he  did  not  learn  the  lesson 
of  his  own  work  as  fully  as  he  might  ;  and  that,  either  in 
consequence  of  this  or  of  evil  habits  of  older  date,  he  set 
a  very  bad  example  in  two  ways.  One  was  that  of  tamper- 
ing with  the  actual  ballads,  which  does  not  much  concern 
us  ;  the  other,  that  of  imitating  them  with  a  prava  imitatio, 
which  concerns  us  very  much.  The  results  were  shown 
throughout  the  rest  of  the  century.  Except  Chatterton 
and  Blake,  no  one  before  Southey  and  Coleridge  showed 
any  real  grasp  of  ballad  metre  ;  no  one  before  Coleridge, 
any  real  -grasp  of  ballad  diction.  The  error  is  shown  in 
Percy's  own  original  work  more  than  sufficiently,  and  in 
that  of  many  others  ;  and  it  appears  glaringly  in  the 
third  great  ballad  collection  of  the  century,  that  of  Evans.1  Evans. 

Far  be  it  from  me  to  be  hard  on  this  good  bookseller. 
Not  only  did  he  extend  Percy's  selection  of  ballads 
considerably,  especially  in  the  Robin  Hood  part,  but  he 
ransacked  the  1723  collection  and  other  sources  with 
some  care,  and  had  at  least  the  wits  to  include  Chatterton 
among  his  moderns,  or  the  fortunate  folly  to  believe  him 
an  ancient  His  book  must  have  done  good. 

But  it  may  also  have  done  some  harm,  and  has 
certainly  the  record  of  more.  Mickle,  who,  though  not  a 
bad  man,  was  a  great  fashioner  of  not  very  good  modern 
antiques,  is  believed  to  have  had  much  to  do  with  the 
collection,  and  things  like  "The  Prophecy  of  Queen  Emma," 

1  There  are  two  issues  of  this.  The  first  appeared  originally  in  1777, 
with  a  second  edition  in  1784;  the  other  in  1810.  This  latter,  much  the 
handsomer  and  better  book,  is  also  immensely  improved  by  additions,  omissions, 
and  corrections — most  of  the  namby-pamby  imitations  being  cast  out  neck 
and  crop.  But  this  very  fact,  and  its  date,  make  it  of  no  great  use  to  us  as 
a  document  even  at  that  date ;  and  quite  out  of  place  here.  What  follows 
above  will  therefore  be  restricted  to  the  first  issue. 


528  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

said  to  be  written  by  "  Mr.  Mickle  the  very  ingenious 
translator  of  the  Lusiad,  author  of  Almada  Hill,  an 
excellent  poem,  etc.,"  abound.  Now  we  do  not  want,  and 
nobody  ought  ever  to  have  wanted,  such  stuff  as — 

O'er  the  hills  of  Teviot  beaming, 

Rode  the  silver  dawn  of  May, 
Hostile  spears  and  helmets  gleaming, 

Swelled  along  the  mountains  gray. 

There  is  no  solace  in  this  sin  ;  it  is  only  the  sin  of  a 
solace  which  is  for  the  moment  in  abeyance.  When  they 
Chattertonise  spelling  they  are  more  dreadful  still. 

But  there  is  no  need  to  dwell  on  this.  It  was  inevit- 
able :  it  was  the  scum  of  the  fermentation  which  Percy 
had  introduced.  And  before  long  the  good  wine  was 
to  come  in  The  Ancient  Mariner ;  who  indeed  was,  let 
it  be  remembered,  "  Auncyent "  and  "  Marinere  "  at  first, 
and  did  otherwise  bedizen  and  bedevil  himself. 
Some  minor  But  it  would  be  somewhat  curmudgeonly  to  leave  this 
lyrics.  much-abused  century — which  was,  after  all,  let  it  be 
remembered,  one  of  the  wisest  in  history,  though  its 
wisdom  was  narrow — with  praise  merely  of  its  fishings- 
up  of  pearls  in  lyric  which  were  not  its  own.  It  had 
some  of  its  own  besides  those  which  have  been  mentioned 
in  dealing  with  its  greater  writers  ;  and  some  of  these,  if 
not  quite  of  the  purest  Orient,  such  as  only  a  very  base 
or  a  very  foolish  Judean  would  deliberately  throw  away. 
The  charming  toy-symphony  of  Pulteney's  "  Strawberry 
Hill,"  *  and  the  admirable  anapaests 2  which  he  and  Chester- 

1  Since  Denham  sang  of  Cooper's, 

There's  scarce  a  Hill  around 
But  what  in  song  or  ditty 

Is  turned  to  fairy  ground  ! 
Ah  !  peace  be  with  their  memory, 

I  wish  them  wondrous  well ; 
But  Strawberry  Hill,  but  Strawberry  Hill, 

Will  ever  bear  the  bell ! 

2  Had  I  Hanover,  Bremen,  and  Verden, 

And  likewise  the  Duchy  of  Zell, 
I  would  part  with  them  all  for  a  farthing, 
To  have  my  dear  Molly  Lepell  ! 

Pronounce   "Verden"   with   the   proper    English  value  of  er,   and   give 
"  farthing"  its  then  correct  form  of  "  farden,"  and  the  rhyme  will  be  spotless. 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  529 

field  jointly  wrote  for  Molly  Lepell,  are  capital  prosodic 
examples  of  the  wit,  and  the  merriment,  and  the  good 
temper  that  set  off  the  wisdom.  Scores  of  other  well- 
known  things,  from  "  The  Girl  I  left  behind  me  "  onwards, 
show  that  improved  sureness  of  rhythmical  grasp  on 
which  we  have  commented,  and  shall  comment.  I  do 
not  know  who  wrote  this  "  Girl,"  but  I  am  nearly  certain 
that  much  greater  poets  than  he  would  have  been 
unable  to  keep  the  ring  and  swing  of  his  measure,  as  he 
does,  only  a  generation  or  so  before.  Nor  does  anybody 
seem  to  know  who  wrote  the  sweet  and  gracious  address 
to  "  My  Winifreda,"1  which  appeared  in  a  miscellany  edited 
by  D.  Lewis  as  early  as  1726;  but  whoever  it  was,  he  had 
that  very  rare  gift  of  making  each  line  catch  up  the  last, 
and  so  establishing  an  unbroken  chain  from  beginning  to 
end  of  the  karole.  Far  later,  how  did  Mrs.  Crewe's 
mother  secure  the  wonderful  throb  (almost  early  seven- 
teenth century  in  its  character)  of  certain  stanzas 2  in  the 
"  Prayer  to  Indifference  "  ?  That  she  may  have  at  times 
been  sorry  for  having  married  "  out  of  the  window  "  that 
typical  fine  gentleman,  Mr.  Greville,  is  highly  probable. 
The  final  lines — 

Half-pleased,  contented  I  will  be — 
Content  but  half  to  please, 

can  be  interpreted  better  from  certain  passages  in  Fanny 

1  With  its  well-known  last  stanza — 

And  when  with  envy  Time,  transported, 

Shall  think  to  rob  us  of  our  joys, 
You'll  in  your  girls  again  be  courted, 

And  I'll  go  wooing  in  my  boys. 

This  very  agreeable  thing  ("Away!  Let  nought  to  Love  displeasing") 
has,  I  believe,  been  often  reprinted.  I  met  it  last  in  Mr.  Arber's  Pope 
Anthology  (Oxford,  1899),  pp.  208-9. 

2  I  ask  no  kind  return  in  love, 

No  tempting  charm  to  please  ; 
Far  from  the  heart  such  gifts  remove 
That  sighs  for  peace  and  ease. 

Nor  ease  nor  peace  that  heart  can  know 

That,  like  the  needle  true, 
Turns  at  the  touch  of  joy  or  woe — 

But  turning,  trembles  too  ! 

VOL.  II  2  M 


530  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIH 

Burney's  Diary  than  many  puzzles  of  the  sort.  But 
the  instance  of  passion — of  whatever  kind — quickening 
the  actual  structure  of  the  verse,  is  curious,  and  not  too 
common  in  the  century. 

These  instances  have  been  taken  from  anonymous  or 
non-professional  verse  writers  ;  but  the  patient  explorer 
of  the  preserves  mentioned  above *  will  find  not  a  few 
reliefs  to  mere  prose  and  mere  singsong  in  the  minor 
poets  of  the  time.  Harry  Carey  may  have  been  chiefly 
inspired  by  music  when  he  wrote  "  Sally  in  our  Alley," 
and  (if  he  wrote  it)  "  God  save  great  George  our  King." 
But  the  lyrical  motives  to  be  found  in  that  little  read  and 
certainly  very  minor  poet  Langhorne2  show  once  more 
how,  when  prosodic  form  is  once  thoroughly  accomplished, 
it  remains,  so  to  speak,  out  of  commission,  but  ready  :  a 
hulk  it  may  be,  dismantled  and  moored  in  some  out-of- 
the-way  creek,  but  always  capable  of  being  fitted  out, 
and  manned,  and  manoeuvred  by  the  right  poet 
The  hymn-  so,  too,  some  further  reference  should  perhaps  be 

writers 

Charles  made  to  the  hymns  which  constitute  no  small  part  of  the 
Wesley.  lyrical  achievement  of  the  time.  Here  it  may  be  thought 
specially  rash  to  attempt  to  separate  the  purely  prosodic 
character  from  the  musical  on  the  one  hand,  and  the 
strictly  religious-sentimental  on  the  other.  Yet  I  believe 
it  can  be  done.3  Take  any  of  the  masterpieces  of  Charles 

1  As  it  was  once  frivolously  put — 

For  poetical  curios  whoso  would  search, 

Let  him  look  in  the  volumes  of  Dodsley  and  Pearch. 

It  is  wondrous  how  many  quaint  ends  and  queer  odds  lie 

Concealed  in  the  store-house  of  Pearch  and  of  Dodsley. 

2  I  have  dwelt  elsewhere  on  the  singular  beauty  of  Langhorne's  stanza — 

Where  longs  to  fall  that  rifted  spire, 

As  weary  of  the  insulting  air  ; 
The  poet's  thought,  the  warrior's  fire, 

The  lover's  sighs  are  sleeping  there. 

(Of  course,  he  printed  it  "th'  insulting,"  but  he  knows  better  now.)  The 
whole  poem  "The  Wallflower"  (Fable  vii.  of  Flora},  rococo  as  it  may  be,  has 
a  strange  and  delightful  languor  of  rhythm  and  phrase. 

3  And   it  must    be   remembered   that,    as  was  pointed   out   at    the  very 
beginning  of  this  History,    hymns,    from    their  constant  communication  ad 
vulgus,  have  a  strange  power  of  disciplining  the  general  ear.      "  If  only  they 
did  not  do  it  so  badly  ! "  says  some  one.     Amen.     But  when  they  do  it  well  ? 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  531 

Wesley,  of  Toplady,  of  Cowper.  Several  of  these,  and  several 
dozens,  scores,  hundreds,  or  thousands  more  of  other  hymns, 
were  composed  for  the  same  old  tunes.  All  of  them,  without 
exception,  have  the  same  inspiration  of  sentiment,  and 
even  the  same  mould  of  biblical  diction.  That  part  of 
the  difference  of  the  good  ones  from  the  bad  ones  arises 
from  the  better  handling  of  the  thought,  is,  of  course,  not 
to  be  denied.  But  I  think  it  can  be  shown  also  that  a 
good  deal  arises  from  the  purely  prosodic  manipulation  of 
the  measure,  from  the  ransacking  of  the  lexicon,  and  the 
fingering  of  the  selected  vocables.  They  say  Charles 
Wesley  wrote  between  six  and  seven  thousand  hymns — 
a  sin  of  excess  for  which  he  perhaps  deserved  a  very  short 
sojourn  in  the  mildest  shades  of  Purgatory,  before  his  due 
translation  upwards  for  the  best  of  them.  Of  these  best 
take  even  such  as  "  Hark  the  herald  angels  sing," l  or 
"  Jesu,  lover  of  my  soul,"  which  it  is  difficult  even  to  read 
without  hearing  the  well-known  tunes.  But  resist  that 
temptation,  wax  your  ears  like  Ulysses,  and  you  will 
find  that  the  mere  word-music  is  fingered  throughout  in 
the  most  absolutely  adequate  manner  :  while  there  is  some- 
thing more  for  us  in  his  transformation  of  Cennick's  crude 
and  "  string-halting  " 

Lo,  he  cometh,  countless  trumpets 
Blow  before  his  bloody  sign, 

into  the  gorgeous 

Lo,  he  comes  with  clouds  descending  ; 

which  the  Reverend  Martin  Madan  of  Thelyphthora  fame 
naturally  tried  to  spoil. 

Toplady  is  an  even  better  example,  for  "  Rock  of  Ages  "  Toplady. 
owes  much  less  to  its  tune  than  the  others,  or  rather  is 
much  more  easily  separable  from  it.      Almost  any  "  croon- 
ing "  kind  of  accompaniment,  fitting  the  feet,  would  suit  it ; 

1  I  quote  it  thus  because  otherwise  nobody  would  recognise  it.  Wesley 
wrote  "  Hark  how  all  the  welkin  rings."  The  alteration,  with  some  others, 
is  apparently  due  to  Whitefield,  and  is  one  of  the  few  good  to  many  bad 
examples  of  tampering  with  hymns.  These  may  be  traced  in  Mr.  Julian's 
invaluable  Dictionary  of  Hymnology  (London,  1892;  new  ed.  1907). 


532  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

that  is  to  say,  it  is  independent  of  any  ;  it  is  like  the 
great  Latin  hymns  which  carry  their  own  music  with 
them  ;  and  accordingly  all  the  attempts  to  "  Latin  "  it  are 
as  bad  as  are  the  Englishings  of,  say,  Dies  Irae.  Every 
word,  every  syllable  in  this  really  great  poem  has  its 
place  and  meaning :  a  fact  of  which  the  respectable 
persons  who  change  "  eyestrings  break "  into  "  eyelids 
close  "  and  "  riven  "  into  "  wounded  "  are  no  doubt  as 
ignorant  as  those  who  have  tampered  with  Chatterton. 
And  I  fear  it  must  be  said  that  the  hopelessness  of  the 
late  Dr.  Grosart  as  a  critic  (he  was  invaluable  in  other 
ways)  is  nowhere  better  shown  than  by  his  remark  that 
Toplady  was  "  no  poet,"  unless  it  be  by  the  fact  that  he 
deplores  the  comparative  ignoring  of 

Dateless  principle,  arise  ! 

which  is  prosodically  weak,  verbally  awkward,  and  chiefly 
suggestive  of  an  epitaph  on  the  head  of  a  nondescript 
college  whose  birth-year  was  unknown. 

Cowper.  But,  of  course,  the  chief  interest  here  is  in  Cowper,  who, 
though  he  may  never  have  gone  quite  so  high  in  this 
particular  line  of  ascent  as  Wesley  and  Toplady,  scattered 
and  squandered  himself  much  less  than  the  first ;  is  not 
nearly  a  "  single  speech,"  like  the  second  ;  and,  besides,  is 
a  poet,  apt  at  many  if  not  all  weapons,  and  not  merely 
a  singer  whose  lips  are  specially  and  solely  touched  by 
the  coals  from  the  actual  altar.  It  has  been  said  above 
that  his  variety,  even  in  profane  work,  is  rather  remark- 
able ;  it  is  almost  more  so  here,  because  the  tendency  of 
hymns — with  their  few  metres,  their  well-known  tunes, 
and  their  stock  subjects — is  towards  monotony.  But 
Cowper  gets  strikingly  different  and  strikingly  good 
effects  out  of  most  of  his  measures  and  many  of  his 
themes. 

Oh  !  for  a  closer  walk  with  God, 

though  its  rhymes  shock  the  captious  modern,  possesses  a 
curious  plaintive  dreaminess,  contrasting  with  the  skip  and 
hop  of 

Ere  God  had  built  the  mountains. 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  533 

No  finical  and  Philistine  dislike  of  the  phraseology  ought 
to  blind  any  lover  of  poetry  to  the  wonderful  tranced 
adoration  of  the  movement  of 

There  is  a  fountain  filled  with  blood ; 
and  I  do  verily  believe  that 

Hark,  my  soul,  it  is  the  Lord, 

suggested  its  well-known  tune  imperatively,  though  the 
tune  is  but  a  feeble  echo  of  the  prosodic  music. 

What  various  hindrances  we  meet 

is  weaker — in  fact,  one  of  the  weakest ;  but  not  so 
God  moves  in  a  mysterious  way. 

Indeed,  one  may  say,  without  irreverence,  that  the  way  in 
which  this  prosaic  century  ceases  to  be  prosaic  in  divine 
poetry  is  rather  mysterious. 

A    paragraph    or    so    may   suffice  —  because   there    is  Later 
nothing  at  all  new  or  very  special  about  the  individuals —  century" 
for  the  continuation  of  the  work  of  Prior  and   Swift  in  anapasst  and 
anapaest  and   iambic   octosyllable.     But  it  could  not  be  °c 
wholly   omitted,  because   of  the  immense  importance  of 
these  measures  as  strongholds  of  lighter  and  freer  move- 
ment ;  and  it  may  be  placed  here  not  improperly,  because 
both  are  constant  vehicles  of  lyric.     Both  were  utilised 
all   through  ;   but   the  most  important   document  of  the 
octosyllable   was    lodged    early   in   the   shape   of  Dyer's  Dyer  and 
beautiful  Grongar  Hill,  which  coincided   in  date  with  the  Anste>' 
earliest  of  Thomson's  Seasons.      Dyer  afterwards  relapsed 
into  blank  verse,  on   Thomson's  own   model,  where  he  is 
of  no  particular  importance.      In    Grongar  Hill  he  is  of 
much ;  for  he  there  went  not  to  Swift  or  to  Prior,  but 
straight   to   Milton,   and    wrote   such  mixed   measure   as 
had  not  been  seen  since  "  Comus  " — 

On  the  mountain's  lonely  van.1 
They    shook    their    heads    for    more    than    a    couple    of 

1  I  have  always  wondered  whether  he  meant  "van"  in  the  local  sense — 
"  Brecknockshire  Van,"  "  Carmarthenshire  Van,"  etc. 


534  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTUR  Y  BOOK  vnr 

generations  over  the  mixture  ;  but  it  could  not  fail  to  do 
good. 

Of  the  many  practitioners  of  the  lighter  continuous 
anapaest,  Byrom,  who  has  been  noticed  above,  and  Anstey 
of  the  New  Bath  Guide,  stand  out  perhaps  most  prominently. 
Anstey  did  not  confine  himself  to  the  anapaest,  but  wrote 
(even  in  this  book)  in  octosyllables  and  other  forms.  Yet 
it  is  for  his  handling  of  the  triple  measure  that  he  is 
deservedly  celebrated.  Indeed,  he  stands  to  Prior  in 
this  class  very  much  as  Thomson  stands  to  Milton. 
He  had  the  advantage  of  a  still  further  modernised 
language ;  and  I  really  do  not  know  that  much  advance 
has  been  made  upon  him  in  the  mere  handling-  of 
this  delectable  instrument  for  light  satire  since.  And, 
once  more,  the  extreme  popularity  of  the  book  helped 
to  popularise  the  measure,  and  to  fix  its  principles, 
all  unconsciously,  in  the  ears  of  those  who  read  it. 
His  other  works  were  of  little  or  no  value  ;  indeed,  as 
Horace  Walpole  is  rather  fond  of  repeating,  the  additions 
to  the  New  Bath  Guide  itself  are  inferior  ;  but  the  first 
chronicle  of  the  Blunderheads  helped  to  fix  the  anapaest 
as  the  favourite  measure  of  the  later  eighteenth  century 
for  easy  verse.  Not  merely  was  it  used  for  definitely 
satiric  purposes,  as  in  Goldsmith's  Retaliation,  and  in 
much  of  the  political  work  which  was  such  a  feature  of 
the  time  ;  but  people  of  all  sorts  and  conditions,  from 
men  of  full  age  and  sufficient  position,  like  Dr.  Burney, 
to  school-boys  or  undergraduates,  like  Southey,  wrote 
doggerel  diaries  in  it — a  distinct  testimony,  if  not  in  very 
valuable  material,  to  the  general  sense  of  its  being  at  the 
opposite  pole  from  the  couplet.  The  octosyllable  was 
similarly — one  need  not  say  degraded,  but — hacked  in 
Doctor  Syntax  and  others  of  Combe's  productions  ;  but 
here  the  example  of  Hudibras  was  of  older  standing,  and 
showed  less  of  any  prosodic  feeling  peculiar  to  the  time. 
In  both  cases,  however,  the  metres  did  run  a  certain 
danger  of  appearing  to  justify  the  comparatively  menial 
position  which  had  been  once  assigned  them  ;  and  we 
get  few,  if  any,  very  fine  serious  examples  of  either  till  the 


CHAP,  in     EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  LYRIC,  ETC.  535 

Romantic  movement  has  well  begun.  Their  inherent 
virtue,  however,  was  sure  to  be  recovered  in  the  case  of 
the  octosyllable,  discovered  in  that  of  the  anapaest,  when 
great  poets  began  to  practise  them  ;  and  meanwhile  they 
served  the  purpose  of  a  foil  to  excellent  effect.  In  fact, 
Grongar  Hill  (which  always  continued  to  be  read  as  part 
of  the  century's  own  work)  was  a  perpetual  testimony  to 
the  poetic  power  of  "  Hudibrastics,"  and  the  real  poetic 
quality  of  the  anapaest  needed  nothing  but  trial  to 
develop  it.1 

1  In  the  above  chapter  it  has  been  necessary  to  omit  detailed  comment  on 
some  interesting  and  accomplished  prosodic  forms,  because  they  present 
nothing  new  in  general  principle,  and  nothing  striking  in  individual  treat- 
ment. For  instance,  Gray's  stanza  in  the  "Spring"  Ode — a  combination 
of  common  measure  and  romance-six  with  lengthened  third  and  sixth  lines — 
is  very  much  better  worked  out  than  any  stanza-form  in  the  York  Mysteries. 
But  in  mid-eighteenth  century  the  perfected  work  is  of  far  less  importance 
to  our  history  than  the  imperfect  work  was  in  the  bridge  of  the  fourteenth 
and  fifteenth. 


CHAPTER    IV 

PROSODISTS 

Revival  of  prosodic  study — Bysshe — The  rigour  ot  the  syllabic 
game — Importance  of  this — Watts — Gildon — Brightland,  etc. 
— Pemberton,  Mainwaring,  Harris — Say  and  Home — Burnet, 
Tucker,  Herries — Sheridan — Steele — Tyrwhitt — Walter  Young 
— Nares  and  Fogg — The  Upper  House:  Shenstone — On  "long" 
rhymes — On  "  dactyls  " — Gray — His  Metrum  notes — Johnson 
— Note  on  Goldsmith,  note — "  Decasyllabomania  "  in  him  and 
others — His  arguments  on  pause — John  Mason — Mitford. 

Revival  of  THE  show  which  we  were  able  to  make  under  this  head, 
study. U  m  our  last  two  chapters  devoted  to  the  subject,  was 
exceeding  poor  and  beggarly — so  much  so  that  even  the 
small  room  accorded  to  them  might  appear  to  a  hasty 
judgment  to  be  mere  waste  of  space  and  abuse  of 
method.  But  no  such  judgment  can  be  passed,  even  by 
the  hastiest,  on  the  present,  except  indeed  by  those  who 
openly  profess  want  of  interest  in  the  whole  subject ;  and 
to  such  one  may  without  churlishness  retort,  Quaere  aliud 
diver sorium.  The  eighteenth  century,  from  its  very 
opening  years,  devoted  itself  to  prosodic  inquiries  ;  and 
though  most  of  these  inquiries  were,  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  present  Book,  conducted  under  almost  totally 
wrong  principles,  and  by  hopeless  methods,  they  tended, 
like  the  work  of  all  blameless  heathens,  to  better  things. 
Nor  is  it  unfair  to  credit  them,  as  a  whole,  on  the  one 
hand  with  a  sort  of  healthy  if  unconscious  reaction  from 
the  rather  unsatisfactory  poetic  practice  of  the  time,  on 
the  other  with  a  direct  preparation  for  the  greater  poetry 
that  was  to  follow.1 

1  I  have,  in  this  chapter,  to  acknowledge,  with  the  greatest  alacrity  and 
satisfaction,  the  help  that  I  have  received,  in  preparing  it,  from  my  friend  Mr. 

536 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  537 

The  present  writer  has  been  already  taken  to  task,  in  Bysshe. 
more  than  one  quarter,  for  exaggerating,  in  his  History 
of  Criticism,  the  importance  of  Edward  Bysshe's  Art  of 
Poetry,  1702.  He  has  only  to  observe,  as  little  contu- 
maciously as  possible,  that  here  this  importance  cannot 
be  exaggerated,  and  that  any  one  who  takes  the  trouble  to 
learn  a  little  about  the  subject  is  not  likely  to  dispute  it. 
As  a  personal  man  of  letters — indeed,  as  an  authority 
who  speaks  not  as  the  scribes — Bysshe  is,  if  anybody 
likes  it,  immediately  above  or  immediately  below  nullity. 
Practically  nothing  seems  to  be  known  about  his  life  ;  the 
Art  itself,1  with  the  exception  of  a  few  pages,  is  mere 
compilation — a  rhyming  dictionary,  and  one  of  similes, 
etc.,  after  the  fashion  of  Poole's  ;  while  outside  it  he 
appears  to  have  merely  translated  and  done  other  hack- 
work. But  (and  a  very  slight  study  of  literary  history 
will  show  that  the  case  is  not  isolated)  he  seems,  somehow 
or  other,  to  find  himself  expressing  what  everybody  had 
been  thinking  more  or  less  confusedly  for  more  than  a 
generation  ;  and  what  almost  everybody  was  to  think  it 
proper  to  think  for  more  than  one  or  two  generations 
more.  Dryden  had  died  at  all  but  the  full  threescore 
and  ten,  two  years  before  Bysshe  wrote  ;  and  during  the 

Omond's  work  on  prosody,  especially  his  English  Metrists  (Tunbridge  Wells, 
1903),  and  its  enlarged  form  (Oxford  and  London,  1907).  Mr.  Omond  and 
I  approach  the  subject  from  rather  different  sides.  As  he  justly  says,  in 
some  kind  remarks  about  this  book,  it  is  planned  as  a  history  "rather  of  our 
verse  itself  than  of  what  critics  have  said  about  it."  And  Mr.  Omond  takes 
great,  perhaps  chief,  interest  in  the  points  which  seem  to  me  at  best 
"previous."  But  I  do  not  think  that  there  is  much  difference  between  us 
on  results ;  and  I  have  not  the  least  hesitation  or  shamefacedness  in  referring 
my  readers  to  him  on  some  other  points  which  do  not  interest  me,  and  are 
not,  I  think,  really  relevant  to  my  work.  At  the  same  time,  I  acknowledge, 
as  frankly,  that  he  has  put  me  on  the  track  of  some  interesting  prosodists, 
and  has  saved  me  from  dealing  with  not  a  few  uninteresting  ones.  Nothing 
that  he  writes  can  be  safely  neglected  by  students  of  the  subject.  In  so 
far  as  I  think  it  necessary  to  deal  with  the  questions  which  mainly  interest 
Aim,  and  which  he  dealt  with  first  in  his  Study  of  Metre  (London,  1903), 
an  excursus  on  "What  is  a  Foot?"  with  which  I  hope  to  conclude  this 
work,  will  give  my  views.  It  could  not  really,  according  to  those  views,  be 
written  satisfactorily  save  after  a  survey  of  the  whole  facts. 

1  It  appeared,  as  stated  above,  in  1702,  and  was  frequently  reprinted.  I 
use  the  "Third  edition  with  large  improvements,"  London,  1708.  It 
appears  that  Bysshe  was  a  Sussex  man,  and  may  have  been  connected,  in 
blood  as  in  name,  with  Shelley.  Which  would  be  humorous. 


538  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIIF 


whole  of  Dryden's  life — nay,  before  it,  in  the  practice  of 
Waller.and  in  the  practice  and  principles  of  Beaumont — the 
stopped  regular  decasyllabic  couplet  had  been  more  and 
more  establishing  itself  as  the  perfect  form  of  verse.  But, 
as  we  saw  in  the  last  two  chapters  under  this  heading, 
people  were  strangely  shy  of  entering  into  any  detail 
about  "  numbers "  :  it  almost  seemed  as  if  it  were  held 
unlawful  to  utter  the  sacred  principles. 
The  rigour  of  Bysshe  had  no  such  scruples  ;  probably  he  was  one 
°^  tne  clear-headed  but  stupid  men  who  have  none.  His 
Preface  is  mere  ordinary  "  talkee-talkee  "  ;  but  his  "  Rules 
for  Making  English  Verse "  (which,  with  examples  of 
some  length  and  frequency,  fill  thirty-six  pages)  show  a 
perfectly  clear  conception,  an  undoubting  mind,  and  a 
considerable  faculty  of  drafting.  "  The  structure  of  our 
verses,  whether  blank  or  in  rhyme,  consists  in  a  certain 
number  of  syllables  ;  not  in  feet  composed  of  long  and 
short  syllables."  He  is  so  particular  about  this,  which 
certainly  is  the  hinge  of  the  whole  question,  that  he 
works  it  out  with  rather  superfluous  arithmetic — explaining 
that  verses  of  double  rhyme  will  always  want  one  more 
syllable  than  verses  of  single  ;  decasyllabics  becoming 
hendecasyllables,  verses  of  eight  syllables  turning  to  nine, 
verses  of  seven  to  eight.  "  This  must  also  be  observed  in 
blank  verse" — an  iteration  which  will  not  seem  quite 
damnable  when  you  perceive  that  the  syllable  is  the 
"  Faith  "  of  Bysshe's  creed — that  everything  depends  on 
it,  and  that  it  must  be  specified  in  every  case.  Once 
let  an  uncertain  number  of  syllables  in,  or  permit  the 
syllables  in  any  way  to  group  themselves  or  coalesce,  and 
Troy  falls.  Then  of  the  several  sorts  of  verses.  Our 
poetry,  he  thinks,  admits,  for  the  most  part,  of  but  three 
verses — those  of  ten,  eight,  or  seven  syllables.  Those  of 
four,  six,  nine,  eleven,  twelve,  and  fourteen  are  generally 
employed  in  masques  and  operas  and  in  the  stanzas  of 
lyric  and  Pindaric  odes.  We  have  few  entire  poems 
composed  in  them  ;  though  twelve  and  fourteen  may  be 
inserted  in  other  measures  and  even  "  carry  a  peculiar 
grace  with  them."  In  decasyllabic  verse  two  things  are 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODJSTS  539 

to  be  considered — the  seat  of  the  accent  and  the  pause. 
The  pause  (he  works  this  out  rather  elaborately)  ought  to 
be  at  the  fourth,  fifth,  or  sixth  syllables.  The  strongest 
accent  must  be  on  the  second,  fourth,  and  sixth.  One 
does  not  quite  see  why  he  says  nothing  about  accent  in 
the  last  four  places  ;  and  indeed  he  is  less  explicit  about 
the  second  half  of  the  line  throughout.  Perhaps  the 
possibility  of  a  redundant  syllable  bothered  him.  And 
he  says  less  about  accent  generally  than  about  pause, 
though  he  is  sure  that  "  wrong  placing  "  of  it  is  as  great  a 
fault  in  English  as  a  false  quantity  was  in  the  classical 
languages.  To  make  a  good  decasyllabic  you  must  be 
careful  that  the  accent  is  neither  on  the  third  nor  fifth — a 
curious  crab-like  way  of  approaching  the  subject,  but 
bringing  out  in  strong  relief  the  main  principle  of  all  this 
legislation,  "  Thou  shalt  not."  The  verse  of  seven 
syllables,  however,  is  most  beautiful  when  the  strongest 
accent  is  on  the  third. 

More  curious  still  is  his  way  of  approaching  tri- 
syllabic metres.  As  such,  he  will  not  so  much  as  speak 
of  them.  "  Verses  of  nine  and  eleven  syllables,"  it  seems, 
"  are  of  two  sorts."  "  Those  accented  on  the  last  save 
one "  are  merely  the  redundant  eights  and  tens  already 
spoken  of.  "  The  other  [class]  is  those  that  are  accented 
on  the  last  syllable,  which  are  employed  only  in  com- 
positions for  music,  and  in  the  lowest  sort  of  burlesque 
poetry,  the  disagreeableness  of  their  measure  having 
wholly  excluded  them  from  grave  and  serious  subjects." 
The  guileless  reader1  will  hardly  suspect  that  these  nasty 
idle  things  are  neither  more  nor  less  than  anapaestic  ; 
though  for  some  extraordinary  reason  Bysshe  does 
not  even  mention  the  full  twelve -syllable  form  under 
any  head  whatever.2  I  suppose  the  "  lowness  and  dis- 

1  I  can  honestly  say  that  when  I  first  read  Bysshe  I  did  not  know  what 
he  was  talking  about  till  I  came  to  his  examples. 

2  His    "verses    of    twelve    syllables"    are    "truly    heroic" — in    fact, 
Alexandrines.     Yet  he  must  have  been  perfectly  well  aware  of  the  existence, 
in  no  less  a  poet  than  Dryden,  of  such  lines,  not  merely  as 

She  had  heard  of  a  pleasure  and  something  she  guessed, 


540  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY          BOOKVIII 

agreeableness "  of  the  thing  was  too  much  for  him,  and 
as  he  had  disallowed  feet  he  had,  at  any  rate,  some  logical 
excuse  in  making  nothing  of  them.  He  admits  triplets 
in  heroic,  and  repeats  his  admission  of  Alexandrines  and 
fourteeners,  concluding  this  section  with  a  funny  little 
sniff.  "  The  verses  of  four  or  six  syllables  have  nothing 
worth  observing,"  though  he  condescends  to  give  some 
from  Dryden. 

Under  the  head  of  "  Rules  conducing  to  the  beauty 
of  our  versification,"  and  with  the  exordium,  "  Our 
poetry  being  very  much  polished  and  refined  since  the 
days  of  Chaucer,  Spenser,  and  other  ancient  poets,"  we 
find  that  you  must  avoid  hiatus  ;  always  cut  off  the  e  of 
"  the  "  before  a  vowel  ;  never  allow  even  such  collocations 
as  "  thy  z'ambics "  or  "  into  a  book "  ;  never  value  such 
syllables  as  "  amazed  "  and  "  lowd,"  but  always  contract 
them ;  avoid  alliteration  ;  never  split  adjective  from 
substantive,  or  preposition  from  verb,  at  the  end  of  a  line. 
"  Beauteous  "  is  but  two  syllables,  "  victorious  "  but  three. 
You  must  not  make  "  riot "  one  syllable  as  Milton  does. 
"  As  Milton  does  not"  one  says  ;  though,  of  course,  Bysshe 
would  have  thought  "  -ot  ascends "  as  a  foot  a  thing 
too  horrid  to  contemplate.  You  may  contract  "  vi'let " 
and  "  di'mond,"  and  if  you  do,  should  write  them  so. 
"  Temp'rance,"  "  diff'rent,"  etc.,  are  all  right  ;  and  you 
may  use  "  fab'lous "  and  "  mar'ner  "  (not  Silas).  But 
Bysshe  acknowledges  that  "  this  is  not  so  frequent."  And 
he  rejects  or  doubts  some  of  the  more  violent  and  most 
hideous  apostrophations,1  but  has  no  doubt  about 
"  t'  amaze,"  "  I'm,"  "  they've,"  and  most  others.  Rhyme  is 
not  very  fully  dealt  with,  but  for  the  most  part  correctly 
enough — so  far  as  Bysshe's  principles  go.  Stanzas  of 
"  intermixed  rhyme "  (like  rhyme-royal,  the  octave,  and 


which  he  would  probably,  on  his  own  abominable  devices,  have  scanned 
"  she'd,"  but  as 

What  they  meant  by  their  sighing  and  kissing  so  close, 

which  is  proof  against  "  apostrophation." 

1  Such  as  those  of  "  b'  "  for  "  by  "  and  "  wh'  "  for  "  who. " 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  541 

the  Spenserian)  "  are  now  wholly  laid  aside,"  for  long 
poems  at  least ;  but  he  gives  a  good  many  examples  of 
them  for  all  uses,  and  seems  more  sorry  for  than  angry 
at  Spenser's  "  unlucky  choice."  Shakespeare,  it  seems, 
invented  blank  verse  to  escape  "  the  tiresome  constraint 
of  rhyme."  Acrostics  and  anagrams  "  deserve  not  to  be 
mentioned." 

Now,  no  doubt,  there  is  not  much  originality  in  this  ;  importance 
and  I  need  scarcely  defend  myself  from  the  suspicion  of  of 
agreeing  with  it.     But,  in   the  first   place,   I  shall,  as  a 
historian  of  English  prosody,  be  very  much  obliged  to  any 
one  who  will  point  out  to  me  anything  at  all  like  it  earlier 
as  a  coherent,  thorough-going,  practical  code  of  rules  for 
the  making  of  English  verse.      Secondly,  I  shall  be  very 
much  obliged  if  any  one  will  point  out  to  me  a  flaw — 
there  are  gaps,  but  a  gap  is  not  necessarily  a  flaw — in  its 
theory.     Thirdly,  I  shall  be  most  of  all  obliged  to  any  one 
who  will  disprove  my  contention  that  what  Bysshe  here, 
in  his  downright  way,  codified  and  mummified  was  the 
actual  creed  of  almost  everybody  from  a  time  pretty  well 
before    Bysshe's   probable   birth   to  a   time   many   years 
after  his  probable  death. 

It  does  not  matter  that  Gildon  sneers  at  the  tractate. 
It  does  not  even  very  much  matter,  on  the  other  side,  that 
it  was  rapidly  and  repeatedly  reprinted,  and  that  it  re- 
mained the  popular  handbook  of  English  verse  during  some- 
thing like  the  whole  century — Blake,1  of  all  people  in  the 
world,  being  apparently  in  the  habit  of  consulting  it  long 
afterwards.  The  point  is  that,  as  has  been  said  above, 
Bysshe  caught  up  and  uttered,  in  hard  and  fast  sym- 
bolic terms,  the  creed  of  the  eighteenth  century  itself, 
of  not  a  few  years  before  the  eighteenth  century,  and  of 
a  good  many  after  it.  Within  the  year  1907  I  saw  a 
letter  from  a  no  doubt  most  respectable  person  to  a 
literary  paper,  saying  that  he,  the  person,  had  seen 
Coleridge's  verse  in  Christabel  much  praised,  but  was  this 

1  See  in  Mr.  Swinburne's  Blake,  pp.  130,  131,  the  pleasant  story  of  Blake 
and  his  wife  (on  spiritual  suggestion)  trying  Sortes  Virgilianae  on  Bysshe, 
with  results  from  Aphra  Behn  and  Dryden's  Virgil  respectively  (v.  sup.  p.  417). 


542  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 


verse  really  "  regular  "  according  to  orthodox  views  ?  We 
know  what  Bysshe  would  have  told  him  ;  we  know  what 
Bysshe  did  tell  him  a  hundred  years  before  Christabel, 
and  two  hundred  before  his  own  respectable  letter.  I  do 
not  think  it  is  quite  fair  to  Bysshe  to  say,  as  my  friend 
Mr.  Omond  does,  that  he  "represents  the  traditional 
view."  Where  is  the  evidence  of  "  the  tradition  "  ?  In 
what  preceptist  writer  before  him  ?  In  practice  before 
him  it  exists ;  but  he  brought  this  practice  out,  formulated 
and  crystallised  it.  I  think  he  was  utterly  wrong — wrong 
most  of  all  in  discarding  feet ;  wrong  in  dwelling  too 
much  on  accent ;  wrong  in  countenancing  "elision";  wrong 
in  his  estimate  of  various  metres  ;  wrong  everywhere 
and  every  way  except  in  some  points  of  rhyme.  But 
he  was  wrong  with  a  fascinating  and  logical  sequacious- 
ness  ;  and  he  was  wrong,  as  a  theorist,  in  the  manner  of 
a  real  and  eminent  heresiarch. 

Watts.  Seven  years  later  than  Bysshe,  Watts  in  his  Preface  to 
Horae  Lyricae  has  some  interesting  prosodic  remarks. 
At  this  early  time  (the  Preface  is  dated  May  14,  1709) 
he  tells  us  that  he  had  endeavoured  to  give  his  couplets 
"  the  same  variety  of  cadence,  comma,  and  period  "  [i.e.  the 
lesser  and  the  greater  pause]  which  blank  verse  glories 
in."  "  It  degrades,"  he  continues  (and  remember  that 
Pope  was  only  just  beginning  to  publish)  "  the  excellency 
of  the  best  versification  when  lines  run  on  by  couplets, 
twenty  together,  just  in  the  same  pace  and  with  the  same 
pauses.  It  spoils  the  noblest  pleasure  of  the  sound  ;  the 
reader  is  tired  with  the  tedious  uniformity,  or  charmed 
to  sleep  with  the  unmanly  softness  of  the  numbers  and 
the  perpetual  chime  of  even  cadences."  But  even  in  his 
"  essays  without  rhyme  "  he  has  not  "  set  up  Milton  for  a 
perfect  pattern,"  though  he  "  shall  ever  be  honoured  as 
our  deliverer  from  the  bondage."  It  seems  that  "the 
length  of  his  periods,  and  sometimes  of  his  parentheses, 
runs"  the  good  Doctor  "out  of  breath" — on  which  occasions 
one  might  have  hoped  that  the  hospitable  Lady  Abney 
was  ready  with  some  cordial  not  spoken  against  in  the 
Scriptures  ;  but,  in  fact,  it  was  a  year  or  two  before  he 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  543 

became  her  guest.  "  Some  of  his  numbers  seem  too 
harsh  and  uneasy."  But  it  is  evident  that  he  is  thinking 
even  more  of  burlesques  of  Milton  than  of  Milton  himself. 
"In  Pindarics"  Watts  "has  avoided  the  excessive  lengths  to 
which  some  modern  writers  have  stretched  their  sentence," 
and  he  lays  down  the  golden  rule,  "  the  ear  is  the  truest 
judge."  These  are  generalities,  of  course  ;  but  whether  he 
goes  right  or  wrong  in  them  (and  he  does  both)  they 
seem  to  me  to  be  at  any  rate  in  the  right  vein,  and  a 
good  deal  more  important  than  the  accent-and-quantity 
battle  which  was  before  long  to  begin. 

Charles  Gildon  1  seems  to  me,  on  the  other  hand,  of  Gildon. 
very  little  importance,  except  that  he  was  one  of  the  first 
to  adopt  the  heresy  of  denoting  verse  by  minims  and 
crotchets,  and  that,  in  what  Mr.  Carlyle  would  have 
called  rather  a  "  high-sniffing "  manner,  he  puts  down 
Bysshe  with  his  bare  accents  and  syllables,  and  insists  on 
real  "  numbers  " — though  it  is  very  difficult  to  attach  any 
precise  meaning  to  this  fashionable  word.  Gildon  had 
some  parts  and  some  literature  ;  but  there  was  a  good 
deal  of  Grub  Street  in  him,  which  sometimes  took  the 
special  form  of  the  pedant  and  sometimes  that  of  the 
coxcomb.  And  I  have  never  known  anybody  who 
endeavoured  to  express  prosody  in  terms  of  music  without 
coming  to  grief. 

Another  and  rather  earlier  opponent  of  Bysshe,  John  Brightiand, 
Brightland,  in  his  English  Grammar  (1711)  also  condemns  etc- 
the  reliance  on   accent,  and  insists  on  quantity  ;  but  has 
little  detail.     He,  Gildon,  and  one  or  two  others2  may 
have  had  something  to  do  with  the  raising  of  the  "  accent 
v.  quantity  "  battle  just  referred  to.      It  has  been  fought 
at  intervals  ever  since  ;  it  shows  not  the  slightest  signs 
of  settlement ;  and  indeed  it  never  can  be  settled  :  because 

1  Who  wrote  on  the  subject  in   The  Complete  Art  of  Poetry  (1718)  and 
The  Laws  of  Poetry  (1721).      (Pope's  remarks  (sup.  p.  471)  are  of  17/0.) 

2  The  excellent  Maittaire,  who  had  the  grateful  task  of  producing  some 
good   editions,   and    the    ungrateful    one    of  teaching    young    Stanhope    (see 
Chesterfield's  Letters},  thought  that  English  verses  "  commonly  consist  of  five 
feet,  governed   more   by  accent   than   quantity."     He  also  informs   us  that 
"  exercises  of  poetry  of  some  length  are  called  poems  :  those  that  are  shorter, 
copies  of  verses. " 


544  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  via 

it  is  almost  impossible  to  get  a  set  of  definitions  of  terms 
which  any  two  combatants  will  accept.1 

The  fight,  however,  went  on,  in  this  section  of  it,  for 
a  considerable  time,  sometimes  extending  over  the  whole 
field  of  ancient  and  modern  poetry,  sometimes  limiting 
itself  to  the  classics,  sometimes  to  English.  I  have  read 
most,  if  not  all,  of  the  texts,2  but  have  found  very  little 
in  them  which  needs  notice  here,  and  a  curiously  general 
Pemberton,  unsatisfactoriness  by  results.  The  Observations  on  Poetry, 
for  instance,  of  Henry  Pemberton  (1738)  would  treat 
Milton  more  ultra-Bentleiano,  and  alter  every  line  which 
contains  a  trochee,  reading — 

And  rolling  towards  the  gate  her  bestial  train, 

etc. ;  while  for  the  same  reason  the  whole  of  L' Allegro 
and  //  Penseroso,  "  those  otherwise  excellent  pieces,"  is 
black-marked.  "  Pause  is  the  only  available  source  of 
variety";  and  Pemberton  greatly  admires  Glover.  Edward 
Main  waring  (1744)  is  again  disastrously  musical,  as  in 
fact  most  of  them  are.  He  wants  "  tierce  minors " 
and  "  tierce  majors "  in  poetry  ;  and  is  one  of  the 

1  I   may  take  for  example  myself  and  my  friend  Mr.   Omond,  who,   I 
believe,  agree  pretty  generally  as  to  results,  and  cordially  as  to  the  necessity 
of  ' '  feet "  or  something  of  the  kind .     But  Mr.  Omond,  while  he  objects  as 
I  do  to  making  accent  the  basis  of  English  prosody,  thinks  it  impossible  that 
accent  can  create  quantity.      I   feel  quite   sure  that   it   can,   or  rather   (for 
"create"  may  cause  misapprehension)  can  give  "brevet"  rank  in  quantity. 
But  then  that  is  because   we  do  not   agree   in   the  definition   of  the   word 
quantity.     To  me,  quantity  is  simply  that  which  fits  a  syllable  for  occupying 
a  "  long"  place  in  a  foot,  or  that  which  only  fits  it  for  a  "  short "  ;  and  I  use 
"long"  and  "short "just  as  I  might  use  "black"  and  "white,"  to  denote 
the  difference  of  the  two  constituents  of  feet,  which  I  am  quite  as  ready  to 
call  Greek  and  Trojan  or  anything  else. 

2  I  began  making  up  my  leeway  (I  had  known  not  a  few  long  before)  for 
the  History  of  Criticism,  and  have  completed  the  process,  or  nearly  so,  for 
this  book.      With  the  exceptions  which  will  be  noted  above,  I  have  never 
had  a  more  thankless  task.     The  much-abused  scholastics  knew,  and  knew 
thoroughly,  what  they  were  talking  about.      Most  of  these  eighteenth-century 
prosodists  hardly  knew  anything  of  English   poetry.      The  great  Dr.  John 
Foster,  for  instance,  in  his  Essay  on  Accent  and  Quantity,  which  contains  some 
glimmerings,  bases  the  enormous  generalisation,  that  "our  dissyllabic  nouns  are 
for    the   most   part    trochaic  and  our  verbs  iambic,"  on  the  small   class  01 
identically  spelt  nouns  and  verbs  ("concert"  and  concert,  etc.),  where  the 
distinction  had  actually  been  made,   for  convenience'  sake,   not  long  before 
his  own  time. 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  545 

first  to  suggest  the  trochaicising  of  standard  iambic 
metres — 

And  |  mounts  ex  [lilting  |  on  triumphant  |  wings. 

He  laments,  memorably,  that  though  Milton  has  the 
numbers  that  he  likes,  "  they  are  generally  confounded 
by  prosaic  stops."  Harris  of  Hermes  fame  has  a  little 
about  poetry,  and  redeems  his  terrible  description  of 
Milton's  verse  as  consisting  of  "  ten  semipeds "  by 
admitting  that  each  of  these  animalcules  can  "  carry  a 
pause."  Samuel  Say  (1744)  is  above  all  things  an  Say  and 
elocutionist,  and  great  on  "  making  the  sound  suit  the Home- 
sense."  He  too  is  musical ;  and  perhaps  owes  to  this  his 
exaggeration  (of  a  doctrine  which  up  to  a  certain  sense 
is  true)  that  "  every  syllable  in  English  is  common."  But 
when  we  try  the  result-test  he  shrinks  up  at  once,  as  they 
all  do  ;  for  he  thinks  Prior's  estropiement  of  the  Spenserian 
"noble,"  "the  noblest  of  the  Poems."  Lord  Kames 
(same  year)  in  the  Elements  of  Criticism  takes  the  extreme 
opposite  line  to  that  of  his  brother  on  the  bench,  Monboddo 
(v.  inf.}.  He  is  an  apostle  of  correctness  ;  even  Pope  is 
sometimes  too  lax  for  him.1 

In  the  same  year  with  Foster  and  Kames,  an  odd 
person  named  Daniel  Webb  wrote  Remarks  on  the  Beauties 
of  Poetry,  following  them  up  seven  years  later  with 
Observations  on  the  Correspondence  of  Poetry  and  Music. 
Webb  is  a  quaint  mixture.  He  attacks  Pope  for  mono- 
tony, and  praises  Shakespeare  and  Milton  for  variety.  But 
he  has  this  very  odd  misunderstanding  of  Shenstone's 
(?  v.  inf.}  plea  for  the  "dactyl  "  :  "Some  are  of  the  opinion 
that  a  dactyl  may  take  place  in  the  pentameter.  This 

1  As  I  rather  took  up  the  cudgels  for  Kames  in  my  History  of  Criticism 
on  some  points,  I  am  bound  to  say  here  that  his  eighty  pages  on  Versification 
contain  very  little  of  value.  He  thinks 

This  nymph,  to  the  destruction  of  mankind 

(as  happy  a  line  for  its  prosodic  adaptation  as  may  be)  "  harsh,"  because  "  the  " 
is  lengthened  ;  and  reduces  ' '  Scotch  metaphysics  "  to  the  almost  unbelievably 
absurd,  by  alleging  that  there  cannot  be  a  pause  even  in  melody  between 
adjective  and  substantive,  because  "  a  quality  cannot  exist  independent  of 
a  subject." 

VOL.  II  2  N 


546  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIU 

verse  consists  of  five  feet  or  ten  syllables.  If,  therefore, 
we  appropriate  three  syllables  to  one  foot,  there  must  be 
a  foot  of  one  syllable,  which  would  be  contrary  to  nature." 
One  could  have  no  better  instance  of  the  depth  to 
which  the  syllabic  idea  had  entered,  and  the  harm  it 
had  done  ;  hardly  any  better  example  of  the  preposterous 
fashion  in  which  these  writers  approach  their  subject. 
Burnet,  There  was  a  great  outburst  of  prosodic  work  in  the 
Herries'  seventies  °f  t*16  century.  Not  only  did  Monboddo's 
work1  then  begin  to  appear  (1773),  but  in  the  same 
year  came  a  treatise2  by  "  Light  -of  -Nature  "  Tucker, 
under  his  usual  pseudonym  "  Edward  Search,"  and 
another 3  by  John  Herries.  As  everybody  who  is  familiar 
with  the  Light  of  Nature  itself  would  expect,  Tucker's 
tractate  is  amusing ;  but  it  is  much  more  phonetic  than 
prosodic.  He  experiments  in  hexameters,  but  thinks  the 
iamb  the  English  foot,  and  in  fact  is,  like  most  people  in 
this  chapter,  not  "at  the  point  of  view."  John  Herries 
anticipated,  though  on  less  magnificent  scale,  a  notion 
of  Guest's — trying  to  arrange  accented  and  unaccented 
syllables  in  all  possible  permutations  and  collocations,  of 
which  he  makes  178.  Elocution  is  always  at  one  ear  of 
Herries,  and  Music  at  another  ;  and  they  distract  him 
properly.  At  one  moment  he  thinks  that  an  accented 
syllable  is  not  always  long  (which  is  true  enough  when 
you  can  escamoter  the  accent) ;  at  another,  that  accent 
and  quantity  very  seldom  coincide — which  is  absurd  from 
almost  any  point  of  view  ;  and,  at  a  third,  that  the 
longest  syllables  are  accented — which  throws  the  whole 
thing  into  chaos  again. 

Sheridan.  Two  years  later  came  that  victim  of  Johnson's  in- 
justice, "  Sherry,"  to  demonstrate  in  his  Art  of  Reading 
how  unjust  the  Doctor  could  be.  Of  course,  being  a 
teacher  of  elocution,  he  is  M.  Josse,  and  his  profession 
plays  him  some  tricks.  Of  course,  likewise,  he  might 

1  The  Origin  of  Language.     He  deals  largely  with  accent  and  quantity 
"  in   the  abstract "  ;   approves  of  Milton   for   "  breaking   the   measure "  ; 
actually  likes   the  "  bottomless  pit "  ;    and  has  many  glances  in  his  usual 
way — often  wrong-headed  but  never  stupid.     Still  it  is  all  a  priori. 

2  Vocal  Sounds.  3   The  Elements  of  Speech. 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  547 

know  more  than  he  does.  But  that  "  we  indolently 
adopted  French  prosody "  is  about  as  true  as  it  is  false 
in  regard  to  what  he  was  thinking  of.  It  is  a  great  thing 
at  this  time  to  have  a  man  dismissing  the  valuation  of 
"  echoing  "  as  "  ech'ing  "  with  the  term  "  absurd  "  ;  and 
one  would  much  rather  have  a  man  believe,  as  he  does, 
in  the  pyrrhic  and  the  amphibrach  than  believe  in 
nothing  but  the  iamb.  And  he  is  so  good  on  the  pause 
that  it  may  have  been  the  reason  of  Johnson's  objection  ; 
while  if  he  depreciates  rhyme  and  extols  blanks — once 
more  he  is  M.  Josse.  No  !  "  Sherry  "  shows  no  dulness, 
either  by  nature  or  in  art,  here,  though  he  is  rudimentary. 

As  to  Joshua  Steele  and  his  Prosodia  Rationalis,  I  steeie. 
find  myself,  perhaps  for  the  first  time,  in  total  disaccord 
with  Mr.  Omond,  who  thinks  very  highly  of  him.  That, 
in  Mr.  Omond's  own  words,  Steele  "  proclaims  that  verse 
is  essentially  matter  of  musical  rhythm,  and  applies 
musical  methods  frankly  and  fully  to  the  notation  of 
metre,"  naturally  does  not  prejudice  me  in  his  favour  ; 
but  I  hope  I  have  shown  myself  fairly  superior  to  mere 
prejudice  already,  and  in  this  particular  matter  I  may 
appeal  to  my  treatment  of  Mason  and  Mitford  below. 
I  do  not  care  what  system  a  man  adopts,  so  that  his 
system  brings  out  the  beauty  of  good  English  verse,  and 
the  ugliness  of  bad.  But  the  proof  of  the  prosody  to 
me  is  in  the  scansion ;  and  even  Mr.  Omond  himself 
admits  that  Steele's  scansion  is  "  utterly  wild."  I  should 
say  that  it  was  contemptibly  and  impudently  ridiculous. 
He  scans * 

O  happiness  !  our  being's  end  and  aim, 

O  |  happiness  j  our  |  being's  |  end  and  |  aim, 

and  gravely  adds,  "  whosoever  would  pronounce  with 
propriety  must  allow  at  least  six  cadences  by  the  aid  of 
proper  rests  "  in,  apparently,  any  heroic  line.  Sometimes 
there  are  eight.  He  has  "  met  no  one  to  whom  this  was 

1  Let  me  observe  that  I  have  no  objection  to  anacrustic  scansion  as  such. 
It  is  sometimes  necessary,  often  optional,  and  it  forms  the  basis  of  my  own 
theory  as  to  English  hexameters ;  but  as  applied  to  the  heroic  or  to  most 
if  not  all  iambic  schemes,  it  simply  turns  the  whole  measure  topsy-turvy. 


548  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

enunciated  who  was  not  immediately  convinced  of  its 
truth  and  utility  "  (I  wish  /  had  met  Mr.  Joshua  Steele). 
He  thinks  that  Milton,  "  making  use  of  his  natural 
senses,"  arranged  the  first  lines  of  Paradise  Lost  for 
scansion  thus — 

Of  |  man's  |  first  disojbedience  |  and  the  |  fruit  Of  |  that 
for  |  bidden  |  tree  |  whose  |  mortal  |  taste  Brought  |  death  | 
into  the  |  world  |  and  |  all  our  |  woe  |  Sing  |  Heavenly  |  Muse. 

He  calls,  of  course,  the  English  heroic  a  "  hexameter," 
and  the  Latin  hexameter  an  "  octometer."  Now  really  ! 
I  own  that  I  cannot  at  all  share  Mr.  Omond's  admiration 
for  Steele's  mere  theory  ;  and  I  have  grave  doubts  about 
the  point  for  which  he  praises  him  most — the  inclusion 
of  the  pause,  as  a  matter  of  course,  in  the  constituency  of 
the  line.  Some  pauses  should  no  doubt  be  so  included. 
I  myself  believe  in  "  the  pause-foot "  as  a  reality,  and  an 
important  one.  But  the  ordinary  pause  is  not  a  foot  ; 
and  you  can  have  the  most  beautiful  lines,  and  any 
number  of  them,  without  a  pause  at  all.  All  Steele's 
notation  seems  to  me  a  musical-mathematical  superero- 
gation, if  not  a  musical-mathematical  hallucination.  Yet 
I  could  tolerate  it  if  it  had  led  him  to  any  good  results. 

His  results  are  not  good  :  they  are  bad,  absurd, 
revolting.  He  can  have  had  no  more  notion  of  the  true 
prosodic  music  of  any  piece  of  English  verse  than  the 
swine  have  of  the  pearls — not  so  much  as  the  cock 
had  of  the  iaspis.  When  Mr.  Omond  says  that  "  real 
students  will  hail  Steele  as  a  master,"  I  can  only  say 
that  I  regretfully  take  my  name  off  the  books.  I  am 
not  a  real  student.  I  will  not  hail  Steele  as  a  master 
except  of  utter  prosodic  chaos.  The  only  object  of 
prosody — its  only  business,  its  only  reason  for  existence — - 
is  to  give  English  verse  a  true  interpretation.  His 
interpretation  is  utterly  false. 

Tyrwhitt.  Fortunately,  the  true  method  vindicated  itself  in  this 
same  year,  1775,  for  then  appeared  Tyrwhitt's  Chaucer. 
Here  there  was  no  substitution  of  theory  for  study  of 
fact.  On  the  contrary,  the  actual  verse  which  had 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  549 

always  been  beautiful,  which  made  its  beauty  felt,  as  in 
Dryden's  case,  even  to  those  who  mistook  the  facts,  was 
cleared,  manifested,  exhibited  as  it  was.  You  cannot 
have  two  better  examples  of  a  prosodist  in  his  right 
mind  and  a  prosodist  out  of  it  than  Tyrwhitt  and  Steele. 
Tyrwhitt  himself  still  did  not  know  quite  enough  ;  he 
should  not  have  held  our  verse  to  be  wholly  "  of  Norman 
origin."  But  he  admitted  the  trisyllabic  feet  (which  are 
not  of  Norman  origin),  and  this  takes  the  mischief  out  of 
his  perhaps  still  too  great  belief  in  syllables  and  accents. 
He  had  only  to  learn  a  little  more ;  he  could  hear 
already.  Steele,  it  is  obvious,  was  absolutely  without 
ear  for  poetry,  whatever  he  may  have  had  for  music.1 

With  regard  to  the  Rythmical  [sic]  Measures  of  Waiter  Young. 
Walter  Young,  contributed  to  the  Royal  Society  of 
Edinburgh,  read  in  1786,  but  to  be  found  at  p.  550  of 
Part  I.  of  its  second  volume  of  Transactions  (1790),  I 
hoped  something  from  Mr.  Omond's  first  note  on  it  as 
"  good  and  original."  And  I  got  it  duly  out  of  the  library 
of  the  University  of  Edinburgh,  where  it  had  possibly 
reposed  unread  (unless  Mr.  Omond  consulted  it  there) 
since  it  was  first  shelved.  But  his  later  and  fuller 
notice,  in  his  complete  English  Metres,  may  relieve  others 
from  following  my  example.  Young  is  again  purely 
musical :  he  begins  with  a  priori  musical  considerations, 
as  far  as  prosody  is  concerned,  and  with  very  few  illustra- 
tions from  actual  verse.  Once  more  we  have  the  beginning 
with  an  odd  syllable,  which  seems  obligatory  in  such  cases. 
Blank  verse  is  "  hardly  verse  at  all."  It  appears  to  require 
some  argument  to  prove  that  "  words  may  be  arranged  in 
rhythm,"  which,  considering  that  poets  have  been  doing 
it  for  some  thousands  of  years,  is  rather  superfluous. 
"  Eight  is  most  easily  conceived  as  two  fours  [not  by 
me  !  ].  Sixteen  is  always  conceived  as  four  fours " — 

1  It  is  fair  to  say  that  his  work  was  a  sort  of  incidental  parergon,  arising 
out  of  letters  to  Monboddo,  and  that  he  turned  from  it  to  schemes  of  doing 
good  to  his  negroes  in  Barbadoes.  So  the  world  had  no  more 

Nice  clever  books  from  Josh  Steele  the  philanthropist. 
I  hope  the  negroes  were  the  better.     I  am  sure  the  world  was  not  the  worse. 


550  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY          BOOKVIII 

except  by  the  unworthy  writer  of  this  book.  In  reading 
Milton  you  must  "  sacrifice  the  measure  to  the  sense." 
Again,  there  is  nothing  for  it  but  Mr.  Carlyle's  immortal 
sentence — "  All  these  propositions  I  content  myself  with 
modestly  but  peremptorily  denying."  But  why  go  beyond 
the  Reverend  Walter  Young's  latest  and  best  possible — 
perhaps  his  only — defender?  "Would  that  there  were 
more  such  essays  to  cite,  and  that  the  author  of  this  one 
had  given  more  of  his  attention  to  our  own  verse"  As  to 
the  last  half,  I  can  say,  "  Thou  sayest  it "  ;  but  if  he  had, 
I  think  he  would  have  burnt  his  essay. 

Nares  and  Only  two  other  preceptist  prosodists  of  the  eighteenth 
century  (postponing  those,  such  as  Sayers,  who  are 
directly  connected  with  the  Romantic  movement)  seem 
to  me  to  deserve  notice  here.  They  are  Robert  Nares 
and  Peter  Fogg.  Nares  l  is  of  some  interest  because  he 
illustrates  a  special  point  of  time  in  the  story.  He  refers 
to  "  the  fate  that  has  befallen  Chaucer  "  ;  dwells  specially 
on  "words  that  have  changed  accent,  or  are  the  subject 
of  dispute  respecting  it "  ;  tries  once  more  the  hopeless 
task  of  giving  general  rules  for  quantity — "  a  vowel 
followed  by  a  consonant  is  short "  :  a  rule  which  I  should 
cheerfully  adopt  with  the  addition,  "  except  when  it  is 
long "  ;  and  winds  up  with  the  suggestion — a  favourite 
one  at  various  times  as  a  counsel  of  despair — that  "  the 
elder  poets  meant  rather  to  indulge  themselves,  and 
diversify  their  measure  by  the  admission  of  a  super- 
abundant syllable,  than  to  suppress  the  vowel." 2  Fogg, 
who,  it  must  be  remembered,  is  very  late,3  is  evidently  well 
acquainted  with  his  predecessors,  and  he  has  glimmerings, 
saying  that  you  "  extend "  a  syllable  by  "  lengthening 
the  vowel  and  dwelling  on  the  consonant,"  thus  showing 
that  he  really  has  a  notion  of  the  foot  or  "  isochronous 

1  Elements  of  Orthoepy  (1784). 

2  The  mixture  of  truth  and  error  here  is  interesting  and  almost  pathetic. 
The  good  man  rightly  revolts  at  the  "suppression"  of  a  vowel  ;  but  he  only 
allows  it  to  survive  in  a  limbo  of  extra-metrical  "  superabundance."     That  it 
is  as  full-franchised  a  denizen  or  citizen  of  the  metre  as  any  other  syllable  is 
not  to  be  thought  of. 

3  Dissertations  (1796). 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  551 

interval."  But  there  is  not  much  in  him  ;  and,  in  fact, 
his  dissertations  on  the  subject  are  only  two  out  of  many.1 
I  have  not  much  fear  of  Mr.  Omond's  misunderstand- 
ing me  ;  but  I  shall  be  very  sorry  if  there  seems  to  others 
to  be  anything  superficial,  perfunctory,  or  flippant  in  this 
account,  so  far,  of  eighteenth-century  prosodists.  Almost 
all  the  persons  yet  named  seem  to  me  to  exhibit  the  very 
worst  fault  of  neo-classic  criticism,  the  tendency  to  construct 
rules  from  a  priori  considerations  of  one  kind  or  another, 
or  from  an  absolutely  insufficient  portion  of  the  facts,  and 
then  to  apply  them  to  those  facts  as  if  the  facts  themselves 
were  bound  to  give  way.  The  exact  points  from  which  they 
start,  and  the  exact  quantity  and  character  of  plant  and 
material  with  which  they  may  be  furnished  at  this  start,  no 
doubt  vary  considerably.  Some — most,  indeed — start  with 
music — with  the  occasional  clothes  instead  of  with  the 
universal  body.  Some  start  with  mathematics — with  the 
measuring  rod  instead  of  with  the  substance  to  be  measured. 
Some — perhaps  the  truest  children  of  their  century — start 
with  considerations  of  human  pleasure,  and  of  the  particular 
pleasure  derived,  or  supposed  to  be  derived,  from  orderly 
succession,  etc.  A  very  few,  like  Bysshe  himself  (who 
really  does  not  seem  to  me  by  any  means  the  greatest 
fool  of  the  group),  do  start  with  actual  poetry  and  poets, 
but  either  confine  themselves  to,  or  arbitrarily  prefer,  those 
who  exhibit  certain  limited  forms.  Nobody,  so  far  as  we 
have  gone,  even  attempts  to  make  an  examination  of 
English  poetry  as  a  whole,  or  even  to  collect  a  large 
number  of  different  poetical  examples  that  give  him 
pleasure,  and  to  examine  their  characteristics.  And  the 
result  is  that  even  the  good  remarks  that  are  found  here 
and  there  in  them  are  haphazard,  partial,  likely  to  be 
contradicted,  or  at  least  confronted  with  bad  ones,  on  the 

1  I  gather  references  to  some  other  writers  in  this  note,  that  those  who 
are  curious  about  them  may  look  them  up,  either  in  the  original  or  in  Mr. 
Omond's  book.  For  my  purpose  they  have  little  or  nothing.  John  Brown's 
("  Estimate  "  Brown's)  Dissertation  on  Poetry  and  Music  (1763) ;  Hawkins's 
History  of  Music  (1771) ;  Beattie's  Essays  (1776)  ;  Blair's  Lectures  (1783). 
Some  writers  on  English  hexameters,  etc.,  including  Goldsmith,  I  keep  for 
the  special  treatment  of  that  subject  later.  (But  v.  inf.  p.  561,  note.) 


552  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

next  page.  While,  as  for  general  results,  you  get 
Pemberton  preferring  Glover  to  Milton  ;  you  get  the 
absolutely  Bedlamite  scansions  of  Steele  ;  you  get  Nares 
suggesting  that  if  one  comes  upon  a  superfluous  syllable 
in  an  elder  poet,  one  had  better  conclude  that  it  was  the 
elder  poet's  fun,  and  pass  on.  Once  more,  by  their  fruits 
ye  shall  know  them  ;  and  for  the  fruits  of  this  Covent 
Garden  I  have  no  use  whatsoever. 

The  Upper  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  five  writers  of  this  time, 
House.  Shenstone,  Gray,  Johnson,  Mason  (not  the  poetaster),  and 
Mitford,  who  seem  to  me  to  deserve  close  attention, 
though  their  utterances  differ  much  in  bulk,  and  though 
the  reasons  for  dealing  with  them  are  curiously  various. 
Shenstone.  Shenstone,  for  instance,  has  left  us  but  a  few  hints  on  the 
subject  scattered  about  his  Essays}  Yet  I  know  nothing 
much  more  momentous  in  this  history.  When  we  remember 
that  he  died  in  1763,  and  that,  in  the  lazy  leisure  of  The 
Leasowes,  these  posthumously  published  essays  were 
probably,  if  not  certainly,  jotted  down  for  twenty  or  thirty 
years  previously,  the  following  short  and  casual  remarks 
may  seem  to  some — they  certainly  do  to  me — more 
important  in  the  history  of  English  prosody  than  scores 
of  volumes  of  wrangling  about  accent  and  quantity,  or  than 
limbos  full  of  impossible  notations  that  make  eight  feet 
out  of  an  English  heroic.  They  are  as  follows  : — 

"  Rhymes  in  elegant  poetry  should  consist  of  syllables  that 
are  long  in  pronunciation,  such  as  '  are,'  '  ear,'  '  ire,'  '  ore,'  '  your,' 
in  which  a  nice  ear  will  find  more  agreeableness  than  in  these — 
'gnat,'  'net,'  'knit,'  'knot,'  'nut.' 

"  There  is  a  vast  beauty,  to  me,  in  using  a  word  of  a  particular 
nature  in  the  eighth  and  ninth  syllables  of  an  English  verse — I 
mean  what  is  virtually  a  dactyl.  For  instance — 

And  pikes  the  tyrants  of  the  watry  plains. 

Let  any  person  of  an  ear  substitute  '  liquid '  for  '  watry '  and  he 
will  find  the  disadvantage. 


1  Especially  in  those  on  "Books  and  Writers"  (Works,  ii.  157-180,  228- 
239,  in  3rd  ed.,  London,  1768). 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  553 

"  As  there  are  evidently  words  in  English  poetry  that  have  the 
force  of  a  dactyl,  and  if  properly  inserted  have  no  small  force  on 
that  account,  it  seems  absurd  to  print  them  otherwise  than  at 
length — 

The  loose  wall  tottering  o'er  the  trembling  shade." 

These  may  seem  scanty  texts  upon  which  to  base  On"  long" 
high  distinction  for  a  man.  But  let  us  remember  when  rhymes- 
they  were  written,  and  what  they  mean  if  you  look  at 
them  in  the  light  of  history.  The  first  indicates  a  perception 
of  vowel-music — (not  of  mere  "  sound  suiting  sense  "),  and 
is  moreover  opposed  to  the  whole  practice  of  Pope  and 
his  school,  the  dominant  school  of  the  time,  which  tended 
towards  the  "  short "  rhyme,  in  order  not  to  interfere  with 
the  swift  transition  from  one  half  of  the  couplet  to  the  other, 
and  the  quick  resumption  of  the  second  couplet  after  the 
first.  Of  course,  you  will  find  plenty  of  "  long  "  rhymes 
in  Pope  ;  but  they  are  obviously  not  intended  to  be  dwelt 
on — to  leave  a  sort  of  smoke  and  fringe  of  detonation 
and  flash  after  them.  They  are  whip-cracks,  not  powder- 
explosions. 

The  second  and  third,  moreover,  are  still  more  important.  On  "dactyls," 
Shenstone's  "  dactyl "  is  open  to  misapprehension,  but  it etc> 
is  quite  clear  (though  we  have  seen  that  it,  or  something 
like  it,1  was  actually  misapprehended)  what  he  meant.  He 
meant  trisyllabic  feet — neither  more  nor  less.  He  obscures 
it  by  printing  (if  he  really  would  have  printed  it,  for  he 
never  saw  these  proofs)  "  watry  "  ;  but  he  prints  "  tottering," 
and  "  tottering "  is  enough  to  make  the  whole  "  apostro- 
phating  "  and  strict  decasyllabic  theory  not  merely  totter 
but  fall  to  the  ground.  Now  this  was  what  was  wanted, 
and  this,  I  maintain,  was  what  the  author  of  the  "  Pastoral 
Ballad  "  did  in  these  few  words.  In  three  sentences  he 
restores  echo  to  rhyme,  and  he  restores  undulation  to 
rhythm. 

The  contributions  of  Gray  are  less  scanty,  and  therefore  Gray— his 

Metrum  notes. 

1  Shenstone's  words  were  not  published  till  long  after  Webb  wrote.  But 
Shenstone  was  a  great  letter-writer,  and  the  literary  men  of  the  eighteenth 
century  were  a  much  smaller  and  more  closely  connected  body  than  those  of 
later  times.  Still  there  may  be  some  earlier  utterance  of  the  kind,  and  if  so 
Mr.  Omond  probably  knows  it. 


554  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY          BOOKVIII 

at  least  equally  important,  but  their  importance  is  of  a 
different  character.  They  consist  of  some  seventy  or 
eighty  pages l  of  fragments  intended  for  the  History  of 
Poetry  which  Gray  began,  but  left  to  Warton  to  accomplish, 
at  least,  in  great  part.  And  it  so  happens  that  they  deal 
almost  wholly  (they  are  grouped  under  the  general  title 
Metruiri)  with  what  Warton  2  almost  as  wholly  neglected. 
They  would  thus,  whatever  their  bulk  and  merit,  have  had 
the  immense  moment  of  directing  study  for  the  first  time 
to  historical  consideration  of  prosody,  and  must  so 
outweigh  a  whole  library  of  a  priori  theorists. 

But  independently  of  this  general  gist  and  tendency,  they 
show  that,  even  as  it  was,  Gray's  prosodic  acuteness  was  as 
great  as  we  should  expect  from  a  man  who  joined  very  high 
proficiency  in  the  practice  of  poetry  to  scholarship  quite 
unusual  in  such  practitioners.  That  he  altogether  mistook 
"  riding  rhyme,"  or  rather  frankly  confessed  that  he  did 
not  know  what  it  meant,  is  nothing.  He  probably  missed 
the  connection  with  the  actual  "  ride  "  to  Canterbury  ;  and 
every  student  knows  how  an  initial  miss  of  this  kind  will 
set  one  wholly  in  the  wrong  way,  or  groping  in  vain  for 
the  right.  But  he  more  than  made  up  for  this  mistake 
about  Chaucer  by  detecting,  for  the  first  and  almost  the  last 
time,  till  a  comparatively  recent  period,  the  secret  of 
Spenser's  Oak  and  Breer  and  Fox  and  Kid  verses.  Whether 
Coleridge  knew  these  notes  before  he  published  Christabel 
(they  were  printed  by  Mathias  in  1814),  it  is  impossible 
to  say.  But  if,  by  any  chance,  he  could  have  heard  of 
them  while  he  was  at  Cambridge  (where  they  were  actually 
lying  in  MS.)  it  would  throw  a  great  light  on  what  went 
on  about  the  Quantocks  a  few  years  later.  At  any  rate, 
Gray  hits  the  white.  "  The  measure,  like  our  usual  verse 
of  eight  syllables,  is  dimeter  iambic,  but  admits  of  trochee, 

1  Gray's  Works,  ed.  Gosse,  i.  325  sq.  (London,  1884). 

2  For  which  reason  he  makes  no  independent  appearance  in  our  text.     His 
neglect  of  prosody  is  all  the  more  curious  that  he  was  a  by  no  means  unim- 
portant practitioner  in  it,  helping,  among  other  things,  to  revive  the  Sonnet. 
But  he  not  only  says  very  little  about  it,  but  is  curiously  careless  and  clumsy 
in  what  he  does  say — muddling  up  rhyme -royal   with  octave,  calling  (like 
Dryden,  but  with  far  less  excuse)  the  fourteener  an  "  Alexandrine,"  and  so  on. 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  555 

spondee,  amphibrachys, anapaest,  etc.,  in  almost  every  place." 
I  will  give. him  the  "  amphibrachys  "  as  his  fee  for  the  rest, 
though  the  line l  in  which  he  introduces  it  (for  he  actually 
scans  half  a  score)  I  should  myself  take  differently.  And 
I  do  not  agree  with  him  as  to  the  "  trochaic  "  scansion  2 
of  "  August " ;  but  there  is  nothing  preposterous  about  it 
The  important  point,  however,  is  that,  hit  or  miss,  Gray 
takes  the  texts,  and,  instead  of  cramming  them  into  iron 
boxes,  measures  them  off  with  a  leaden  rule,  or  takes  a 
cast  of  them  in  duly  yielding  plaster.  Even  about  the 
final  e  he  went  nearly  right,3  though  by  conjecture  only. 
He  saw  that  the  Alexandrine  must,  as  a  rule,  have  the 
middle  caesura,  and  that  there  is  no  "  must "  in  regard  to 
others.  His  list  of  texts  shows  astonishing  reading  for 
the  time,  and  his  scheme  of  metres  for  them  almost  as 
astonishing  accuracy.  On  rhyme  ("  pseudo-rhythmus  "  as 
he  calls  it)  there  is  the  same  learning.  He  is  acquainted 
with  the  Life  of  St.  Margaret  and  with  the  Moral  Ode  ; 
and  (probably  on  hints  or  helps  from  Percy)  he  shows  a 
very  fair  understanding  of  alliterative  metre.  Although 
he  is  far  too  kind  (almost  unintelligibly  so,  but  see  vol.  i.) 
to  Lydgate  and  the  "  smoothness  "  of  his  verse,  his  note 
on  the  subject  is,  whether  right  or  wrong,  full  of  interest. 
But  his  title  to  enter  the  Upper  House  of  eighteenth- 
century  prosodists,  his  patent  of  prosodic  nobility,  consists 
in  his  being  the  first  to  be  directly  and  unflinchingly 

1  And  in  I  terrupted  |  all  his  other  speech 

seems  to  me  simply  heroic.     Spenser  often  relapses  into  this,  especially  in 
«<  May." 

2  Then  lo  !  Perigot,  the  pledge  which  I  plight, 
A  maple  ywrought  of  the  maple  warre. 

Anapaestic  rather,  I  think. 

3  Mr.  Omond  has  pointed  out  what  I  had  not  noticed  (though  I  was  aware 
of  some  things  similar  in  the  Rambler},  that  in  the  examples  to  Johnson's 
Dictionary,  twenty  years  before  Tyrwhitt,  some  of  the  Chaucerian  ^'s  are 
valued.  Perhaps  Gray  got  his  idea  from  this,  as  he  may  have  got  his  know- 
ledge of  the  St.  Margaret.  His  prosodic  studies  probably  suggested  the 
remark,  in  the  letter  which  Horace  Walpole  wrote,  but  did  not  send  to 
Chatterton,  about  the  Rowley  metres  having  not  then  been  invented.  This 
remark  is  partly  true  and  partly  false  ;  but  is  made  from  a  point  of  view  which 
not  many  men  in  England  had  then  reached,  and  certainly  out  of  the  range 
of  Horace,  who  thought  the  poems  were  written  "  in  the  Saxon  language." 


5$6  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

historic.  That  was  the  via  salutis,  and  he  was  the  first  to 
enter  on  it — almost  the  first  even  to  point  it  out. 
Johnson.  The  error  of  belittling  Bysshe  as  a  beacon  is  evident 
when  we  come  from  him,  a  very  small  man,  to  a  very 
great  one,  no  less  than  Samuel  Johnson  himself.  That 
Johnson  learnt  his  views  on  prosody  from  Bysshe  would, 
of  course,  be  an  absurd  proposition,  though  he  must  have 
known  the  book,  and  could  not  well  but  have  generally 
approved  it.  That  he  judges  from  a  bench  practically 
planked  out  of  its  principles  must  be  obvious  to  all, 
except  the  curious  persons  who  say  that  the  ballad 
writers  of  the  fifteenth  century  are  not  witnesses  for  our 
view  of  prosody,  because  they  did  not  at  the  moment 
think  of  it.  For  Johnson  as  for  Bysshe,  rhyme  is  almost 
a  sine  qua  non}  For  Johnson  as  for  Bysshe,  the  counsel 
of  perfection,  the  standard  of  excellence,  in  English  verse, 
is  a  couplet  of  twenty  syllables  exactly  arranged,  with 
an  accent  at  the  2nd,  4th,  6th,  8th,  loth,  in  each  line, 
and  a  rhyme  at  the  end  of  each,  and  a  pause  as  near 
as  possible  to  the  centre  of  each.  All  the  surprising 
judgments,  all  the  dubious  arguments  which  we  find 
in  the  Rambler  and  the  Lives,  come  from  this  primary 
creed.  Yet,  as  indicated  in  a  note  above,  the  very 
examples  of  his  own  Dictionary  provided  texts  for  setting 
folk  right ;  and  in  many  cases,  no  doubt,  did  so  set  them. 
The  "  places "  for  Johnson's  prosodic  utterances  are 
mainly  three — the  Dictionary,  the  Rambler,  and  the  Lives 
(I  put  the  Dictionary  in  front,  though  it  did  not  appear 
before  the  Rambler}.  The  prosodic  doctrines  of  the 
Grammar  in  the  Dictionary  are  unflinchingly  Bysshian. 
Everything  goes  to  syllables ;  iambs  and  trochees  are 
validated  almost  alone,  though  the  anapaest  has  a  sort  of 

1  Johnson  would  probably  have  agreed  with  the  sentiments,  though 
he  would  have  doubly  disliked  the  language,  of  the  late  Mr.  T.  H.  Nolan  of 
St.  John's  College,  one  of  the  authors  of  The  Oxford  Spectator,  and  a  great 
loss  to  his  University  and  to  literature  by  his  early  death.  Nolan,  who  was 
swift  of  foot  and  swifter  of  wit,  used  to  say,  "  Blank  -werse  is  usually  the 

comparative  of bad."     "It  is  very  well,  sir,  but  you  should  not  [pun  or] 

swear,"  would  have  been  the  sage's  remark,  I  suppose ;  though  he  would 
doubtless  not,  as  Nolan  possibly  would,  have  admitted  that  the  maligned  thing 
might  be  the  superlative  of  very  good. 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  557 

recognition.  The  strict  regularity  of  the  accents  con- 
stitutes the  harmony  of  the  lines.  There  are  scarcely  any 
licences  except  synaloepha,  synseresis,  etc. — in  other  words, 
the  abominable  apostrophation,  which,  in  fact,  is  not  a 
licence,  but  a  crime  committed  to  prevent  having  recourse 
to  what  is  thought  licence. 

These  briefly  announced  principles  govern  all  the 
prosodic  remarks  in  the  Rambler  and  most  of  those  in 
the  Lives.  It  is  on  them  that  Johnson  objects  to  the  fine 

both  stood, 
Both  turned,  and  under  open  sky  adored, 

of  Milton's  description  of  Adam  and  Eve  praying.  It 
is  these  that  make  him  denounce  as  "  remarkably  in- 
harmonious " — 

where  thy  abundance  wants 
Partakers,  and  uncropped  falls  to  the  ground. 

By  applying  them  he  condemns  Cowley's  really  exquisite 
And  the  soft  wings  of  Peace  cover  him  round. 

For  these  reasons  Milton's  "  elisions,"  as  he  calls  them — - 
that  is  to  say,  his  trisyllabic  feet — are  an  abomination 
to  him.  For  the  sake  of  these  or  others  closely  connected 
with  them,  he  brands  some  of  the  best  pauses  of 
Paradise  Lost  as  "  inharmonious,"  "  defective,"  "  losing  the 
very  form  of  verse "  ;  and  they  require  few  additions,  or 
even  only  a  little  working  out,  to  enable  us  to  understand 
the  famous  condemnation  of  Lycidas,  the  disapproval  of 
the  Spenserian  stanza,  the  description  of  the  ravishing 
songs  in  Comus  as  "  not  very  musical."  All  these  things, 
preposterous  in  themselves,  lose  their  preposterousness  if 
you  once  remember  the  major  premiss.  The  perfect  form 
of  English  verse  is  a  line  of  ten  syllables  with  the  accent 
resting  on  every  second  syllable  through  the  whole  line  ;  to 
which  one  might  add,  followed  by  another  line  of  the  same 
kind  which  rhymes  to  it,  after  which  the  sense  is  not  con- 
tinued without  a  break.  Johnson's  wide  knowledge  of  all 
the  English  verse  which  followed  his  rules,  and  of  not  a 
little  that  did  not ;  his  extraordinary  mental  alacrity, 


558  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

perspicacity,  and  vigilance ;  the  clear  legal  fashion  in 
which  he  could,  whenever  he  chose,  put  his  arguments  and 
his  judgments, — make  him  by  far  the  greatest  authority 
on  his  side,  and,  in  fact,  if  the  paradox  may  be  allowed, 
an  authority  still  even  when  he  is  seen  to  be  absolutely 
wrong.  There  is  no  flaw  in  the  connection  of  his  con- 
clusions with  his  premisses ;  and  these  premisses  are 
never  disguised,  concealed,  minced,  or  half  comprehended 
by  the  person  who  relies  on  them.  It  is  true  that  they 
are  pure  assumptions,  and,  what  is  more,  assumptions  in 
the  teeth  of  evidence  ;  but  all  that  is  previous.  If  Diana 
of  the  Ephesians  is  great ;  if  the  drumming  decasyllabon 
of  ten  syllables  only,  and  five  immutable  accents,  and  a 
very  slightly  mutable  pause,  is  the  God, — everything  else 
follows. 

••  Decasyiiabo-  In  fact,  I  cannot  doubt  that  decasyllabomania  is  at 
and"others.  ""  ^e  ro°^  °f  almost  all,  certainly  of  a  great  many,  prosodic 
aberrations.  Originally  entertained  as  a  shelter  and 
refuge  from  the  jargon-and-doggerel-welter  of  the  fifteenth 
and  early  sixteenth  centuries,  it  establishes  itself  to  such 
an  extent  in  the  English  mind  that  the  very  revolt 
against  it  cannot  drive  it  out.  Like  the  infernal  power 
in  Mansoul,  it  is  expelled  only  to  maintain,  or  rapidly 
recover,  lodgment  in  high  and  low  places  alike.  We 
are  seeing  what  it  does  with  Johnson  during  its  tyranny. 
We  shall  see  it  lurking  in  Mitford,  despite  his  actual 
championship  of  "  triple  time."  It  is  present,  in  the  most 
singular  fashion  throughout,  with  Guest :  the  crusader 
of  sections  and  accents  and  Anglo-Saxon ries  generally 
is  evidently  of  opinion  that  when  you  once  give  up  the 
more  excellent  way  of  accent  and  alliteration,  there  is 
nothing  for  you  but  pure  Bysshism — though,  of  course, 
he  never  mentions  the  name  of  Bysshe.  It  drives  Dr. 
Abbott  into  the  most  astonishing  conditions  of  extra- 
metrical  syllables  and  slurs  and  the  like.  And  I  am  by 
no  means  certain  that  the  puzzle,  as  it  seems  to  me,  of 
Mr.  Bridges'  elaborate  system  of  metrical  fictions — 
co-existing  with  the  confession  that  all  the  syllables  he 
has  ruled  out  are  pronounced — is  not  due  to  the  ghostly 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  559 

presence  in  the  background  of  this  idol  with  its  ten 
syllables,  its  five  regularly  placed  stresses,  and  the  rest 
of  its  (I  beg  pardon,  but  the  word  is  Miltonic  and 
irresistible)  "  trumpery." 

At  any  rate,  the  constant  presence  of  this  arbitrary 
standard,  and  the  almost  unconscious  reference  to  it, 
supply  a  much  more  satisfactory  explanation  of  the 
saugrenu  judgments  that  we  find  in  Johnson  than  the 
mere  physical  fact  that  his  hearing  was  dull ;  just  as  the 
other  fact  that  his  sight  was  bleared  only  supplies  a  very 
vulgar  solution  of  his  indifference  to  "  prospects."  That 
there  was  a  connection  in  each  case  no  sensible  man  will 
deny  ;  that  the  connection  was  wholly,  exclusively,  and 
sufficiently  causal  few  sensible  men  will  maintain. 
Johnson's  tendency — the  tendency  of  many  of  the  better 
sceptics  to  embrace  one  "  substance  of  a  doubt "  as 
noble,  and  refuse  to  allow  any  dram  of  eale  to  do  it  to 
that  dram's  nature — is  well  known.  He  chose  here  to 
adopt  the  decasyllabic  couplet  of  the  most  rigid  con- 
struction as  orthodox ;  and  all  right-hand  defections 
and  left-hand  fallings  off  from  this  were  bad — at  best 
with  differing  degrees  of  badness.  Lines  ought  to  be 
regular  in  length,  and  the  lines  of  Lycidas  are  not ;  so 
its  numbers  are  harsh  and  unpleasing.  Rhymes  ought 
to  recur  at  regular  intervals,  and  (as  Bysshe  had  boldly 
said)  had  better  not  even  be  alternate  ;  so  the  rhymes 
of  Lycidas,  as  "  uncertain,"  are  bad.  You  want  in  poetry 
sharp  effects  and  quick  returns  ;  so  the  Spenserian  stanza 
is  unpleasing  again.  The  line  should  always  obey  the 
precept  festinare  ad  eventum  ;  so  Collins's  lines  "  clogged 
with  clusters  of  consonants"  deserve  reprobation. 
Alternate  accent  is  a  law,  transgression  of  which  can 
at  best  be  venial ;  and  so  spondees  are  questionable,  and 
trochees,  in  iambic  metre,  intolerable.  The  most  in- 
structive, and  to  sharp-eyed  readers  the  most  ludicrous 
example  of  this,  is  the  way  in  which  Johnson,  after  a 
fashion  which  he  would  have  "  downed "  and  shouted 
over  at  once  in  another  man,  hints  gingerly  side-reasons 
for  edging  the  pause  closer  and  closer  to  the  middle. 


560  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

"  If  a  single  syllable  is  cut  off  from  the  rest,  it  must 
either  be  united  to  the  line  with  which  the  sense  connects 
it,  or  be  sounded  alone.  If  it  be  united  to  the  other 
line  it  destroys  its  harmony  ;  if  disjoined  it  must  stand 
alone,  and  with  regard  to  music  be  superfluous.  For 
there  is  no  harmony  in  a  single  sound,  because  it  has 
no  relation  to  another."  To  which  one  has  only  to 
answer — "  Negatur  !  " 

His  arguments  Even  more  paralogical  and  question -begging  is  the 
argument  against  the  use  of  pause  at  the  second  syllable 
from  end  or  beginning.  "  When  two  syllables  are 
abscinded  from  the  rest,  they  evidently  want  some 
associate  sounds  to  render  them  harmonious."  For 
myself  I  always  suspect  the  word  "  evidently  "  ;  and  one 
had  been  under  the  impression  that  "  two  was  company." 
But  the  climax,  both  of  ingenuity  and  insufficiency,  is 
reached  in  the  argument  against  pauses  (which  he  admits 
to  be  better)  at  the  third  or  seventh.  "  As  the  third  and 
seventh  are  weak  syllables  [by  his  own  arbitrary  hypothesis 
only,  remember],  the  period  leaves  the  ear  unsatisfied,  and 
in  expectation  of  the  remaining  part  of  the  verse."  Now 
one  had  thought  that  this  "  expectation "  was  precisely 
what  the  poet  should  encourage.  But,  as  will  be  seen, 
the  series  of  arguments  leaves  only  the  consecrated  fourth 
and  sixth — for  even  the  fifth  as  "  weak  "  is  inconvenient. 
The  others  are  "  the  noblest  and  most  majestic  which  our 
versification  admits,"  and  that  on  the  sixth  is  the  very 
best  of  all.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  one  does  not 
require  to  go  beyond  his  own  examples  of  all  the  pauses 
(except  that  at  the  ninth,  too  terrible  to  think  of,  I 
suppose),  to  see  that  every  one  can  be  as  "  noble,"  as 
"  majestic,"  as  any  other.  I  should  have  said  myself  that 
nothing  could  deserve  these  epithets  better  than  his 
example  l  of  the  pause  at  the  first,  and,  according  to  him, 
worst.  But  the  whole  thing  is  evidently  working  up  to  a 

1  Defaming  as  impure  what  God  declares 
Pure  ;  and  commands  to  some,  leaves  free  to  all. 

It  is  positively  amazing  that  any  one  should  miss  the  immense  advantage^ 
poetical  as  well  as  rhetorical,  of  this  particular  pause. 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  561 

foregone  conclusion.  The  pause  ought  to  be  as  near  the 
middle  as  the  "  weakness "  of  the  actual  middle  (which 
must  be  weak)  will  allow  it ;  therefore  everything  else  is 
wrong — with  modified  degrees  of  wrongness  perhaps,  but 
wrong.1 

In  1/49,  the  year  of  the  prospectus  of  the  Dictionary,  John  Mason, 
there  appeared  a  couple  of  little  tractates,  in  sequel  to 
each  other,  on  The  Poiver  of  Numbers  and  the  Principle  of 
Harmony  in  Poetic  Compositions  and  on  The  Power  and 
Harmony  of  Prosaic  Numbers.  Neither  had  any  author's 
name  on  the  title-page,  but  they  are  known  to  be  by  one 
John  Mason,  a  dissenting  minister  and  a  teacher  of 
elocution.  The  poetical  tractate  contains  not  a  little 
which  puts  the  axe  to  the  insane  root  of  the  tree  of 
decasyllabomania,  as  well  as  incidental  remarks  of  an 
invaluable  kind.  Like  so  many  of  these  prosodists, 
Mason  invites  a  Biblical  phrase,  by  the  way  in  which  he 
goes  a-wandering  after  musical  analogies ;  but  it  does 
him  little  harm.  He  begins,  if  abstractedly,  yet  happily 
enough,  by  setting  up  pleasure  as  the  object  of  verse  :  and 
the  examination  of  the  source  of  that  pleasure  as  his 
immediate  object.  Then  he  starts  with  "  Times,"  and 
excites  qualms  by  laying  it  down  that  a  single  time 
makes  a  short  syllable  and  a  double  time  a  long ;  but 
he  relieves  us  soon  by  saying  that  the  single  times  are 
some  longer,  some  shorter,  "  and  the  double  times  often 
more  than  double  the  short."  So  too,  though  he  enters 
slightly  into  the  accent-and-quantity  logomachy,  he  comes 
out  of  it  unscathed  ;  and  (with  the  same  possibly 

1  Perhaps  Goldsmith  ought  to  have  a  place  in  this  "  Upper  House  "  for  Goldsmith, 
his  eighteenth  "  Essay"  on  "Versification,"  and  a  remark  or  two  elsewhere, 
especially  that  in  The  Bee,  viii.,  on  "the  unmusical  flow  of  blank  verse." 
This,  which  is  not  very  happy,  is  probably  an  echo  of  Johnson,  whom,  how- 
ever, he  certainly  does  not  follow  in  his  view  of  rhyme  in  his  "  Versification." 
The  fact,  I  suspect,  is  that  his  soul  "did  huddled  notions  try"  here  as  else- 
where. More  has  been  promised  on  his  attitude  to  English  hexameters,  etc. 
But  he  has  the  merit  of  asserting  that  "  to  assert  that  modern  poetry  has  no 
feet  is  a  ridiculous  absurdity  "  ;  of  recognising  that  "  Spenser,  Shakespeare, 
Milton,  Dryden,  Pope,  and  all  our  poets  abound  with  dactyls,  spondees, 
trochees,  anapcests,  etc. "  ;  of  admiring  Collins's  Evening ;  and  of  extolling 
varied  pause.  If  he  had  "settled  his  love"  a  little  more,  he  might  have 
been  of  greater  consequence. 

VOL.  II  20 


562  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

unscientific  but  profoundly  rational  "  transaction "  as  in 
the  former  case)  decides  that  "  that  which  principally  fixes 
and  determines  English  quantities  is  the  accent  and 
emphasis."  There  is  much  virtue  in  your  "  principally," 
and,  as  long  as  we  see  and  cling  to  it,  there  is  no  danger 
of  intabescence.1 

Safely  entered  on  this  via  media,  Mason  is  able  to 
throw  out  all  sorts  of  precious  observations  which  we  may 
gather  up  without  attending  at  all  to  his  musicalities. 
Quoting — 


And  many  an  amorous,  many  a  humorous  lay, 
Which  many  a  bard  had  chanted  many  a  day, 

with  the  scansion  reproduced,  he  observes  on  them  :  "  This, 
though  it  increases  the  number  of  the  syllables,  yet  it 
sweetens  the  flow  of  the  verse,  and  renders  the  ear 
perfectly  reconciled  to  the  irregularity  of  the  metre." 
And  after  pointing  out  that  there  are  fourteen  syllables 
instead  of  ten  in  the  first,  and  twelve  in  the  second,  he 
adds :  "  The  ear,  which  is  ever  the  best  judge  in  this 
case,  finds  nothing  in  them  redundant,  defective,  and 
disagreeable,  but  is  sensible  in  them  of  a  sweetness  that 
is  not  ordinarily  found  in  the  common  iambic  verse."  It 
is  a  good  many  years  now  since,  having  never  previously 
heard  of  Mason,  I  saw  these  tractates  advertised  in  a 
catalogue  and  bought  them  ;  but  I  remember  quite  well 
the  joy  with  which  I  read  this  sentence,  noticing  its  date. 
There  are  others  nearly  as  good,  especially  several 
dwelling  on  the  "  inharmony  "  of  anything  like  a  regular 
caesura  ;  and  though  he  is  excessive  in  some  of  his 
comments  on  Milton,  yet  he  is  right  in  the  principle  on 
which  he  bases  them,  that  too  heterogeneous  "  numbers  " 
will  overthrow  iambic  verse.  Coleridge  has  actually  done 
this  in  Christabel  once  or  twice,  and,  as  has  been  admitted 
above,  Milton  in  his  experiments  sometimes  went  near  to 
doing  it,  though  I  think  Mason  hypercritical  in  the 

1  Virtutem  videant,  intabescantque  relicta. 
You  can  ' '  intabesce  "  in  both  directions  here,  unfortunately. 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  563 

instances  he  selects.  Let  it  be  added,  but  (in  order  to 
send  somebody  if  possible  to  him)  without  detail,  that  he 
has  a  most  interesting  solution  of  the  "  problem "  why 
Dryden  thought  the  Denham  lines  "  Though  deep  yet 
clear  "  so  admirable.  But  his  sweeping  away  of  the  great 
prosodic  heresy  of  the  age — his  appeal  to  the  Caesar  of 
the  ear  about  plusquam-decasyllabic  lines — is  his  warrant 
for  admission  here. 

The  last  prosodist  to  be  mentioned  in  this  place  is  Mitford. 
William  Mitford,  the  historian  of  Greece.  Mitford's 
scheme  and  range  are  distinctly  ambitious ;  and  he  is  not 
below  them  in  a  volume l  of  four  hundred  pages.  He 
begins  with  an  approximation  of  poetry  and  music,  spends 
much  time  on  vowel-sounds,  and  binds  quantity  strictly 
to  time,  separating  accent  from  it.  Then  he  passes  to 
rhythm  or  cadence,  and  admits  in  poetry  as  well  as 
in  music  both  "  common "  and  "  triple "  time.  The 
"  mechanism  of  verse "  succeeds  ;  and  then  we  have  a 
long,  and  for  his  time  most  creditably  well-informed 
chapter,  on  the  history  of  versification.  But  the  new 
historical  and  comparative  spirit  is  far  too  strong  in  him 
to  allow  him  to  be  content  with  this.  Seven  chapters 
and  about  a  hundred  pages  are  devoted  to  the  harmony 
of  Greek  and  Latin  ;  six  chapters  (or  sections,  as  he  calls 
them)  and  about  seventy  pages  to  modern  languages  other 
than  English;  while  some  eighty  pages  more  contain  general 

1  The  second  edition  of  an  Inquiiy  into  the  Principles  of  the  Harmony  of 
Language  (London,  1804).  The  first,  much  shorter,  had  appeared  thirty 
years  earlier.  Mr.  Omond  thinks  it  "  clearer  and  more  pointed."  Perhaps  it 
is,  but  it  almost  necessarily  lacks,  except  in -small  measure,  the  invaluable 
historical  survey  in  which,  to  me,  the  great  merit  of  his  second  consists  ;  for 
in  1774  the  texts  were  seldom  available,  and  Mitford,  then  quite  a  young 
man,  had  hardly  had  time  to  read  what  were.  He  is  theoretic  mainly ; 
indeed,  the  two  forms  differ  so  much  that  comparison  of  them  is  not  easy, 
though  I  have  spent  a  good  deal  of  time  in  working  with  them  side  by  side. 
He  thought  in  the  earlier  book  that  "  modern  poetry  will  not  allow  the  inter- 
mixture of  common  and  triple  feet"  ;  that  "we  know  that  a  certain  number 
of  syllables  and  a  certain  disposition  of  pause  are  necessary."  He  observed 
that  "  the  dullest  ear  [mine  must  be  very  dull]  will  perceive  the  difference 
in  length  between  '  banner '  and  '  banter.' "  He  admits  that  elision,  except  of 
"  the,"  is  objectionable  ;  gives  very  little  analysis  of  English  verse  ;  thinks 
"  starry  "  short  [!!!],  and  pronounces  the  "  bottomless  pit  "  verse  "  not  an 
English  heroic." 


564  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vin 

observations   on    euphony   and    cacophony,  on   grammar, 
and  on  divers  minor  points  including  orthography. 

The  book  is  certainly,  in  its  enlarged  form  at  any  rate, 
by  far  the  most  satisfactory  result  of  combined  theoretic 
and  historical  inquiry  that  had  yet  been  seen.  Like 
Mason,  and  not  like  Steele,  Mitford  is  helped  to  useful 
observation  by  his  attention  to  music.  But  at  the  same 
time  it  led  him  into  errors,  as  it  always  does  ;  for  it  is 
perfectly  certain  that  poetical  music  and  musical  music, 
though  allied,  are  two  separate  things,  often  found  in 
company,  but  sometimes  quite  dissociated,  subject  to 
decidedly  different  laws,  and  though  often  assisting  and 
developing  each  other  in  the  most  remarkable  degree,  yet 
only  to  be  confounded  with  dangerous  results.  Still  the 
most  careless  attention  and  the  least  cultivated  ear  could 
not  but  perceive  that  the  accepted  and  fashionable 
prosody  of  the  neo-classical  school  was  miserably  limited 
in  comparison  with  music  ;  that  the  omnipotent  couplet 
required  all  sorts  of  distortions  and  liberties  to  be  taken 
with  it  before  it  would  suit  musical  setting  at  all ;  and 
that  the  things  that  went  best  to  music  were  the  metres 
which  were  scornfully  admitted  at  best  as  playthings  and 
pastimes.  Yet  everybody  admitted,  and  talked  of,  "  the 
music  of  verse."  This  was  necessary,  for  the  thoughts 
might  and  did  divide  themselves  this  way  and  that. 

It  was  partly,  though  not  wholly,  from  the  weight 
attached  by  Mitford  to  musical  considerations  that  he 
was  led  to  champion  the  accentual  theory  of  English 
prosody.  He  did  so  totis  viribus  ;  and  appears  to  have 
been  led  to  do  so  partly  also  by  a  too  absolute  insistence 
on  time  as  the  foundation  of  quantity  on  the  one  hand, 
as  well  as  by  a  remnant  of  the  old  hard  and  fast  deca- 
syllabic theory  on  the  other.  Nor  did  his  distinction  of 
common  and  triple  time  lead  him  to  the  true  theory 
of  trisyllabic  substitution,  but,  on  the  contrary,  to  that 
unnatural,  unnecessary,  and,  if  widely  adopted,  intolerable 
system  of  "  extra-metrical  "  syllables  which  has,  strangely 
enough,  from  time  to  time  found  patronage  among  the 
elect.  Yet  among  these  elect  Mitford  must  certainly  be 


CHAP,  iv  PROSODISTS  565 

ranked.  Whether  his  main  theories  be  right  or  wrong, 
his  system  of  inquiry  is  a  most  valuable  one,  proceeding, 
as  it  does,  first  on  the  broad  and  safe  ground  of  historical 
investigation  of  the  actual  literature,  and  secondly  by  an 
appeal,  not  to  a  priori  rules,  but  to  the  effect  on  the  ear. 
And  it  frequently  leads  him  to  excellent  results  ;  while, 
be  he  right  or  be  he  wrong,  his  evidence  for  actual 
pronunciation,  etc.,  is  invaluable. 

Thus,  for  instance,  we  get  in  him  a  most  interesting 
and  historically  important  contrast  with  Gascoigne.  That 
early  and  acute  critic,  as  we  saw,  regarded  "  heavn  "  as  the 
normal  pronunciation  of  the  word,  and  "  heav-en  "  as  a 
licence,  to  be  sparingly  and  doubtfully  used.  Mitford, 
among  some  excellent  remarks  on  trisyllabic  feet  (for  he 
does  admit  them,  though  he  sometimes  prefers  "  elision  "), 
has  the  curious  and  rather  hazardous  obiter  dictum, 
"  Thus  we  find  '  heav'n '  and  '  giv'n  '  printed  for  '  heaven  ' 
and  '  given,'  though  to  pronounce  '  heav'n  '  or  '  giv'n  '  as  one 
syllable  is  impossible"  He  objects — very  arbitrarily,  but 
very  naturally,  from  his  accentual  point  of  view — to  the 
use  of  the  terms  trochee,  anapaest,  etc.,  but  he  uses  them 
himself.  What  he  means  by  saying  (p.  95)  that  "rhyme 
is  without  analogy  in  music "  can  only  be  guessed  ;  and 
when  he  pronounces  it  to  be  "  wholly  unrelated  to 
melody  "  one  cannot  even  guess,  unless  "  melody  "  is  used 
in  a  most  improperly  technical  and  limited  sense,  which 
again  exhibits  the  danger  of  confusion.  But  his  indication 
of  its  office  as  a  time-beater  is,  I  think,  novel,  and  of  the 
first  importance.  He  exhibits  not  merely  the  inadequacy 
of  the  limitations  of  the  central  pause,  but  the  fact  that 
great  Pope  himself  had  not  observed  them.  He  admires 
what  he  calls  "  aberration "  of  the  accent  (i.e.  the  sub- 
stitution of  trochee  for  iamb),  with  a  complaisance  which 
is  creditable  to  his  ear,  but  rather  fatal  to  his  accentual 
theory ;  and  he  has  the  attention  to  observe  anapaestic 
rhythm,  or,  as  he  prefers  to  call  it,  triple  "  cadence,"  in  the 
revived  alliterative  verse,  though  he  may  have  gone  wrong 
in  carrying  it  back  to  the  older  forms. 

But  the  most  important,  nay  the  capital  thing,  is  that 


$66  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK  vm 

he  should  have  thought  of  going  to  these  older  forms  at 
all.  Beside  this,  his  attention  to,  and  his  opinions  on, 
such  questions  as  whether  English  verse  is  quantitative  or 
accentual  ;  whether  quantity  depends  solely  on  time  ; 
whether  accent  consists  in  "  loudness  "  or  "  sharpness  "  of 
tone  ; *  whether  rhyme  has  no  analogy  in  music  ;  and  the 
rest, — become  entirely  unimportant.  If  a  man  gives  you 
bread  you  do  not  (except  from  the  most  delicate 
sentiments  of  humanity)  care  whether  he  gives  himself 
stones  or  thistles.  Now  attention  to  the  actual  course — 
to  the  actual  phenomena — of  English  prosody  was  the 
bread  that  was  wanted  ;  and  this  Mitford  gave,  if  not 
perhaps  always  with  the  right  results  to  himself.  Others 
who  followed  his  example  were  sure  to  come  right  sooner 
or  later. 

1  This  minor  battle  is  a  good  example  of  the  way  in  which  this  kind  of 
prosodist  becomes  a  KVfuvoTrpiffTOKa.pda.fj.oy\ij(f>osi  not  with  parsimonious  but 
with  pettifogging  intent. 


INTERCHAPTER    VIII 

THE  break  which  we  have  now  reached  is  not  one  merely 
resorted  to  for  convenience,  because  enough  has  been 
put  into  the  present  volume.  It  corresponds,  not  quite 
in  the  same  way,  but  in  equally  important  degree,  to 
that  at  the  end  of  the  first  There,  after  four  centuries 
of  constant  but  for  the  most  part  quite  untheorised 
practice,  a  little  theory  and  a  great  deal  more  practice, 
culminating  in  the  work  of  Spenser,  had  practically  put 
English  poetry  into  possession  of  its  prosodic  estate, 
though  that  estate  was  only  to  a  very  small  extent  even 
explored,  and  hardly  in  the  least  degree  regularly  sur- 
veyed and  mapped.  Here,  two  centuries  more  have 
almost  completed  the  exploration,  though  certainly  not 
the  occupation.  But  they  have,  for  the  last  two-thirds 
of  them,  witnessed  a  most  curious  withdrawal  from  the 
largest  and  fairest  part ;  while,  though  there  has  been  a 
great  deal  of  work  done  in  the  surveying  direction,  little, 
if  any  of  it,  has  been  done  on  right  principles. 

In  the  first  third  of  these  two  hundred  years — the 
period  covered  by  the  first  two  Books  of  the  present 
volume,  and  extending  from  the  establishment  of  Shake- 
speare to  the  publication  of  Paradise  Lost — the  positive 
addition  to  the  amount  of  prosodic  exercise  is  almost 
incredibly  great  in  value,  as  well  as  in  amount.  From 
the  certain  appearance  of  Venus  and  Adonis^  coinciding 
very  probably  with  that  of  its  author's  first  published 
plays,  to  that  of  Paradise  Lost  itself,  is  little  more  than 
one  reputed  lifetime  of  threescore  years  and  ten.  Yet 
it  includes,  with  one  other  of  scarcely  greater  length,  the 
greatest  bulk  of  the  greatest  poetry  that  we  have  ever 

567 


568  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK 

known.  And  this  poetry  (which  is  the  chief  point  of 
interest  for  us)  takes  a  quite  astonishing  number  of 
forms,  and  practises  them  to  quite  an  astonishing  degree 
of  perfection.  In  these  seventy  years  blank  verse  rises,1 
perfects  itself,  declines,  falls,  and  is  (by  Milton)  raised 
again — a  five-act  chronicle-play  in  prosody  absolutely 
without  parallel  elsewhere.  It  rises  to  such  a  height  in 
its  two  zeniths  that  absolutely  no  metre,  in  our  or  any 
other  language,  can  surpass  it  as  a  vehicle  of  poetry.  It 
falls,  at  its  fortunately  single  nadir,  to  such  a  depth 
that  hardly  the  dog -rhythm  of  the  fifteenth  century 
outstrips  it  in  sinking.  At  the  opposite  pole  in  the 
system  of  vehicles  for  long  poems,  the  continuous  stanza 
reaches,  in  the  Spenserian,  its  most  consummate  achieve- 
ment, and  in  other  forms  one  not  much  lower ;  while 
similar  arrangements  for  shorter  pieces — the  sonnet  as  a 
single  and  uniform  type,  with  the  innumerable  outlines 
of  the  greater  lyric — match  anything  in  other  tongues 
and  other  times  for  perfection.  This  same  perfection,  on 
a  smaller  scale  and  in  simpler  fashion,  but  in  almost 
more  remarkable  degree,  is  shown  by  the  manipulation  of 
quite  ordinary  schemes — mostly  very  old,  and,  it  might 
have  been  thought,  hackneyed,  such  as  the  quatrains  of 
the  common  and  long  measure — which  acquire  a  prosodic 
power  that  they  had  never  known  before,  and  which  they 
have  seldom  known  since.  Experiments  are  made,  not 
so  perfectly  happy,  but  not  unhappy,  with  longer  integers 
— the  Alexandrine  and  the  fourteener. 

Meanwhile,  between  blank  verse  and  the  stanzas,  an 
interesting  change,  or  rather  a  set  of  interesting  develop- 
ments, comes  upon  the  heroic  couplet.  Never  practised 
with  real  success  since  Chaucer  himself  perfected  it  up  to 
a  certain  point,  and  receiving,  to  all  appearance,  a  severe 
rebuff  to  its  prospects  by  the  preference  on  the  stage  of 
blank  verse,  it  is  taken  up  for  non-dramatic  purposes 
slightly  by  Spenser,  indirectly  and  as  part  of  something 

1  If  anybody  objects  that  the  actual  rise  was  earlier,  it  can  hardly  be 
carried  reasonably  beyond  the  first  plays  of  Peele  and  Marlowe ;  and  this 
will  only  extend  the  threescore  years  and  ten  to  the  fourscore. 


VIH  INTERCHAPTER  VIII  569 

else  by  Fairfax,  but  directly  by  Drayton,  Daniel,  and 
many  others,  even  before,  much  more  after,  the  beginning 
of  the  seventeenth  century.  By  degrees  there  appears, 
in  the  practice  of  it,  a  separation,  if  not  a  direct  opposi- 
tion, between  two  forms,  which,  by  Chaucer  himself,  and 
in  the  earlier  Elizabethan  practitioners,  had  been  almost 
indiscriminately  used — the  stopped  and  the  enjambed. 
For  a  time  nobody  devotes  himself  very  extensively  to 
the  first ;  but  the  apparent  advantages  of  the  second 
induce  plentiful  use,  and  by  degrees  no  small  abuse, 
which,  in  its  turn,  encourages,  by  reaction,  the  develop- 
ment of  the  stopped  form.  And  there  is  apparent,  also 
quite  early  in  practitioners  of  the  latter,  something  which 
has  not  been  visible  before — a  disposition  not  merely  to 
prefer,  but  to  impose. 

It  is,  however,  noticeable  in  this  abundant  time  that 
there  is  a  tendency,  outside  of  blank  verse,  to  adopt 
trisyllabic  feet  in  songs  for  music  only.  The  idea — 
which  we  have  seen  turned  into  something  like  a  precept 
even  earlier — that  there  are  no  trisyllabic  feet  gains 
ground ;  though  it  never  establishes  itself  entirely  or 
exclusively  in  practice,  though  not  a  few  beautiful 
examples  of  "  triple  time "  measures  exist,  and  though 
the  admixture  (actual,  if  not  confessed)  of  these  is  the 
very  secret  of  the  perfection  of  blank  verse  itself. 

Then  there  comes  the  strange  and  heavy  change,  the 
beginning  of  which  has  been  described  in  Book  VI.,  and 
the  progress  of  it  in  the  following  Books,  the  last  two  of 
this  volume — a  change  of  the  most  complicated  and  far- 
reaching  nature  as  regards  poetry  itself,  but  gathered  up 
and  symbolised  prosodically  in  a  singular  fashion  by  the 
exaltation  and  almost  idolising  of  the  stopped  couplet. 
This  exaltation,  as  we  have  taken  care  to  point  out, 
though  it  was  largely  due  to  the  influence  of  a  single 
poet,  was  not  due,  by  any  means,  to  an  inability  on  his 
part  to  excel  in  the  measures  which  he  discountenanced. 
Dryden,  it  has  been  shown,  could  and  did  write  excellently 
in  a  very  great  number  of  metres,  and  I  see  no  reason  to 
believe  that  he  could  not  have  written  in  others  still.  There 


570  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK 

are  passages  in  his  almost  unread  lyrics  which  make  it 
not  rash  to  say  that  he  could  have  managed,  if  not  in 
"  the  best  and  most  orgillous,"  at  any  rate  in  no  ill  fashion, 
even  the  Spenserian  novena,  even  the  In  Memoriam 
quatrain.  But  beyond  all  doubt  his  influence  helped 
immensely  the  set  of  the  time  towards  the  stopped, 
antithetic,  more  or  less  rigidly  decasyllabic  couplet. 
At  any  rate,  it  did  triumph.  I  do  not  know  a  more 
remarkable  instance  of  the  completeness  of  that  triumph 
than  a  fact  not  yet  noticed,  though  the  passage  con- 
taining it  has  been  quoted,  that  Shenstone,  a  practitioner 
of  other  forms,  and  at  the  moment  a  protester  against 
the  rigid  mode,  uses  the  term  "  English  verse "  as 
synonymous  with  the  heroic  line.  This  rod  had  not,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  quite  swallowed  up  all  the  others  ;  but  it 
had  actually  made  some  progress  in  the  swallowing  ;  and 
it  was  the  general  theory  of  preceptists  on  the  subject 
that  it  ought  to  do  so. 

For  prosodic  theory  seems  to  have  adjusted  itself  to 
prosodic  practice  in  a  manner  curious  and  almost  un- 
canny. As  we  have  seen,  the  last  forty  years  of  the 
seventeenth  century  furnish  practically  no  prosodic 
treatise,  and  only  a  very  few  prosodic  hints.  Yet  the 
next  has  not  seen  its  second  twelvemonth  close  when  up 
starts  Bysshe  with  a  precise  and  carefully  drawn  code, 
every  principle  of  which  is  directly  adapted  towards  this 
model  ;  which  only  admits  one  other  as  capable  of  being 
in  any  way  ranked  with  it,  and  which  rather  more  than 
hints  that,  except  for  subordinate  and  popular  purposes, 
no  others  should  be  used  at  all.  Moreover,  though  a  few 
protests  are  made  against  parts  of  this  code,  and  more 
against  its  grounding  itself  on  "  accent,"  it  is  quite  clear 
that  the  majority  of  the  prosodists — and  there  are,  as 
we  have  seen,  many  of  them — are  with  Bysshe  in  the 
main.  It  is  the  exception  when  they  take  anything  but 
the  heroic  as  their  subjects  for  illustration  and  demon- 
stration ;  and  though  a  few  of  them — especially  the 
mttomanes  (the  solace  of  whose  sin  is  that  they  cannot 
well  help  admitting  "  triple  time  ") — do  admit  trisyllabic 


vin  INTERCHAPTER  VIII  571 

feet,  it  is  scarcely  ever  on  any  extensive  comparison  of 
different  ages,  types,  and  kinds  of  English  poetry.  The 
couplet  might  long  before  have  taken  the  motto  of  the 
Superintendent  Fouquet — Quo  non  ascendant? — but  it 
was  now  in  the  position  of  Fouquet's  master  and 
tormentor — a  sort  of  Rot  Soleil  of  English  metres. 

Almost,  but  not  quite.  Even  Bysshe,  as  we  saw,  had 
to  recognise  one  not  exactly  rival  but  lesser  potentate — 
the  octosyllable  ;  and  the  octosyllable,  strengthened, 
when  the  couplet  had  not  yet  gained  its  full  authority, 
by  Butler,  had  been  further  fortified  by  Prior  and  Swift, 
and  made  available  for  purposes  peculiarly  germane  to 
the  temper  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Although  much 
of  the  spirit  of  lyric  had  been  lost  for  the  time,  the  forms 
remained,  and  were  sure  to  keep  some  of  the  spirit  itself 
floating  and  lingering  about  them.  The  anapaestic 
metres,  again  mightily  assisted  by  Prior,  had  established 
a  scheme  of  sound,  and,  to  some  extent,  diction,  widely 
different  from,  and,  to  some  extent,  destructive  of  couplet 
verse-morals.  Above  all,  the  restored  blank  verse  of 
Milton,  though  nobody  imitated  it  for  a  long  time,  began 
at  last  to  attract  practitioners,  and  to  prove  itself  the 
most  formidable  rival  of  the  couplet  itself.  The  others 
could  be  tolerated,  because  few  of  them  aspired  to,  and 
none  of  them  was  very  well  suited  for,  the  business  of 
"  long  poems  "  ;  but  this  was  the  main  business  of  blank 
verse.  Moreover,  blank  verse  had  of  old  lent  itself,  and 
was  sure  to  lend  itself  again,  to  all  the  things  which  are 
most  incompatible  with  the  rigid  couplet — which  are 
pitch,  and  fat,  and  hair  to  destroy  that  dragon.  Tri- 
syllabic feet,  enjambment,  free  variation  of  pause, — all 
these  things  blank  verse  brings  with  it  ;  and  all  are  fatal 
to  the  couplet  in  its  triumphant  form,  if  not  in  others. 

Let  it  not,  however,  be  for  one  moment  supposed  that 
I  wish  to  represent  the  stopped  couplet  as  an  Ahriman 
of  English  poetry  or  prosody.  It  was  very  much  the 
reverse :  and  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  fact  that  its 
popularity,  coinciding  with,  and  in  fact  brought  about 
by,  an  excessive  devotion  to  "  prose  and  sense,"  tended 


572  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK 

to  tyranny,  there  would  be  little  to  be  said  against  itself, 
and  much  in  its  favour.  For  one  thing  that  it  did  we 
ought  to  be  perpetually  grateful  to  it.  It  is  evident 
enough  a  priori,  and  has  been  sufficiently  illustrated  from 
the  other  side,  that  the  innate  and  ingrained  freedom  of 
English  verse  has  a  dangerous  nisus  towards  anarchy. 
Already,  by  1700  (in  fact,  by  1650),  there  had  been  two 
periods  in  which  this  danger  had  become  a  reality — the 
chaos,  chiefly  in  rhyme-royal,  of  the  line  in  the  fifteenth 
and  earliest  sixteenth  centuries,  and  the  shameless  dever- 
gondage  of  blank  verse,  and,  to  a  rather  less  extent,  of 
the  enjambed  couplet,  in  the  mid-seventeenth.  Milton,  it 
is  true,  tightened  up  blank  verse  again  ;  but  Milton,  as 
we  have  shown,  allowed  himself  so  many  licences,  and  in 
fact  achieved  his  great  effect  by  allowing  himself  so 
many,  that  he  might  have  been  a  deceptive  example  if 
he  had  been  much  followed  at  once — which,  as  we  have 
seen,  he  was  not — and  if  people  had  thoroughly  under- 
stood his  methods.  Blank  verse,  in  fact,  can  never,  of 
its  nature,  be  a  safe  guide  to  strict  order,  though  it  is  an 
invaluable  one  to  the  recovery  of  liberty  ;  it  depends  too 
much  on  the  individual.  And,  indeed,  much  of  the 
blank  verse  of  the  eighteenth  century  itself  is  evidently 
afraid  of  its  own  franchises,  and  is  almost  stiffer  than  the 
couplet. 

For  stiffness  .  is  not  necessary  to  the  couplet,  though 
regularity  is  ;  and  it  cannot  be  denied  that  a  course  of 
regularity  was  by  no  means  unsuited  to  the  British 
constitution,  prosodically  speaking,  at  this  time.  A 
great  advance  had  been  made  in  settlement  of  pronunci- 
ation, and  it  was  desirable  to  bring  verse  into  accord 
with  this,  both  in  respect  of  accent  and  in  respect  of 
rhyme.  As  a  preliminary  of  recurrence  to  full  equiva- 
lence and  substitution  of  feet,  it  was  very  desirable  to  get 
into  the  poet's  mind  a  strict  notion  of  what  feet  were  ; 
and  this  the  decasyllabic  couplet — even  when  it  is 
chopped  up  by  preceptists  into  ten  syllables  with  no  feet 
at  all — infallibly  provides.  Nobody  with  any  ear  could 
read  twenty  lines  of  Dryden,  or  of  Pope,  or  even  of  much 


vin  INTERCHAPTER  VIII  573 

worse  poets,  without  perceiving  the  five  feet  as  distinctly 
as  he  perceived  his  own  five  fingers.  People  like  Steele 
might,  but  then  they  had  practically  stopped  their  ears. 
No  doubt  these  feet  were  sometimes  not  beautiful  on  any 
mountain — rudimentary,  monotonous,  hard  ;  but  for  the 
purpose  they  were  all  the  better,  because  they  were  quite 
unmistakable.  Having  got  to  conceive  them  as  unities, 
human  nature  was  sure,  sooner  or  later,  to  inquire  with 
itself  whether  their  identity  did  not  admit  of  variation  of 
kinds  ;  and  as  soon  as  this  was  done,  the  tyranny  was 
overpast.  The  couplet  was  drilling  the  people  to  rebel 
against  itself. 

But  it  did  something  else  likewise — something  not 
perhaps  greater,  for  nothing  could  be  greater  than  the 
opportunity  at  least  for  realisation  of  the  foot — but 
something  more  obvious  and  not  less  important.  It 
made  people — to  a  limited  extent  once  more,  but  once 
more  in  a  manner  certain  to  spread  and  germinate — 
perceive  the  necessity  of  attending  to  general  rhythm. 
Up  to  the  time  of  Dryden  one  is  constantly  met — except 
in  Shakespeare  and  Milton — with  extraordinary  and 
almost  unintelligible  break-downs  in  this  respect  It  is 
not  merely  in  extreme  cases  like  that  of  Donne,  which 
have  been  dealt  with  in  their  proper  place,  but  in  almost 
all  others — except  a  few  of  the  lyrists  who  were  preserved 
by  their  form — that  we  meet  these.  The  virus  or 
bacillus  of  the  fifteenth-century  doggerel  had  not  met 
its  phagocyte.  That  phagocyte  was  cultivated  and 
supplied  by  the  couplet.  Here  you  simply  could  not  be 
unrhythmical,  unless  you  were  prepared  to  brook  not 
merely  the  grave  rebukes  of  the  preceptists,  but  the 
"  Away  with  it ! "  of  the  natural  man,  which  met  you  at 
once.  The  couplet  might,  after  a  comparatively  early 
period,  be  unprogressive  ;  it  might  simply  "  mark  time "  ; 
but  it  did  mark  it,  and  in  an  unmistakable  and  imposing 
manner.  Now,  marking  time  is  not  much  fun  ;  it  is 
monotonous  ;  it  is  tedious  ;  it  is  (to  look  at)  rather 
ridiculous.  But  it  is  the  foundation  of  all  good  marching 
and  running,  and  of  all  good  progression  whatsoever. 


574  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOK 

The  couplet  marked  time  quite  admirably,  and  it  taught 
its  enemies  and  supplanters — who  need  not  have  been 
enemies  or  supplanters  at  all  but  for  human  unwisdom — 
to  go  and  do  likewise. 

Some  of  them  were  not  very  quick  to  learn,  and 
blank  verse  especially  stuck  in  the  rudiments.  But  for 
blank  verse  it  was  all  the  better  ;  for  the  disorderliness 
of  the  broken-down  model  of  the  second  quarter  of  the 
seventeenth  century  was  a  terrible  danger,  and  the 
Miltonic  standard  was  for  a  long  time  too  high  for  the 
neophytes.  So  blank  verse  marked  time  too,  and  at 
least  cured  itself  of  the  hideous  shuffle  of  men  even  like 
Suckling  and  Davenant.1  The  octosyllable,  which  had 
not  nearly  so  much  to  unlearn,  learnt  a  great  deal 
under  teachers  like  Butler,  and  Prior,  and  Swift.  The 
anapaestic  metres,  the  faults  of  which  were  not  so  much 
degradations  as  mere  acquired  imperfections  of  youth 
and  bad  company,  gradually  perfected  themselves,  with 
the  general  fear  of  rhythm  before  their  eyes.  Only 
lyric,  which  had  little  to  learn  and  still  less  to  unlearn, 
disappoints  the  examiner ;  and  that  is  because  lyric, 
the  purest  form  of  poetry,  most  requires  something  more 
than  form  to  make  it  admirable. 

Its  actual  forms,  moreover,  and  the  suggestions  of 
more,  had  been  so  thoroughly  put  on  record  by  the 
preceding  century,  that  as  soon  as  the  "  something  more  " 
was  ready  they  were  certain  to  be  utilised.  And  lyric, 
though  it  needed  the  assistance  less,  profited  also  by 
that  disciplining  of  rhythm  which  has  been  dwelt  upon  : 
while  everything  else,  including  the  couplet  itself,  was 
being  more  and  more  prepared  for  the  divine  inspiration 
when  that  inspiration  was  ready. 

Nor,  though  it  is  on  the  skirts  of  prosody,  should  we 
omit  here  to  salute  (what  has  been  already  saluted  in  the 
last  chapter  in  the  person  of  its  capital  and  crowning 
example,  Tyrwhitt's  Chaucer)  the  immense  assistance 

1  The  awkward  blank-verse  attempts  even  of  such  a  metrist  as  Prior 
(outside  of  his  Callimachus  versions,  and  perhaps  in  them)  give  a  striking 
example  much  later. 


viii  INTERCHAPTER  VIII  575 

which  the  eighteenth  century  gave,  by  its  editions  and 
commentaries  on  the  great  writers  before  the  couplet 
accession,  to  that  historic  study  of  actual  English  prosody 
which  is  the  one  thing  needful.  It  is  scarcely  hyperbole 
to  say  that  a  man  who  will  take  Chaucer  and  Spenser, 
Shakespeare  and  Milton,  to  a  lodge  in  some  vast  wilder- 
ness, read  them  and  use  his  wits  on  them  without  pre- 
judice and  without  precedent  theory,  can  hardly  fail  to 
hit  on  the  truth  of  the  whole  matter — that  even  short  of 
this,  study  of  any  of  them  may,  and  probably  will,  give 
him  light  and  leading.  Spenser  and  Milton  needed  no 
great  editorial  aid,  for  they  had  both  (with  whatever 
exceptions  in  Milton's  case)  seen  their  work  in  print,  if 
they  had  not  actually  seen  it  through  the  press.  But 
Shakespeare  was  not  very  well  served  by  his  early  editors 
and  printers,  and  Chaucer  was  very  ill  served  by  some  of 
his.  In  endeavouring  to  set  things  right,  the  early 
eighteenth -century  editors  of  Shakespeare  no  doubt 
patched  and  pieced  too  much  ;  but  still  they  removed 
many  obvious,  and  some  not  so  obvious,  copyists'  and 
printers'  blunders.  Until  Tyrwhitt  it  was  difficult  for 
any  one,  not  a  rather  exceptional  scholar,  to  understand 
Chaucer's  prosody  at  all. 

How  great  was  the  assistance  to  prosodic  study  of  this 
editorial  labour,  and  of  the  study  in  well  or  badly  edited 
copies  of  the  literature  of  the  past  generally,  may  be 
seen  by  comparing  the  two  editions  of  Mitford's  Harmony. 
The  first  may  please  students  of  the  "  previous  question  " 
better,  with  its  wide-ranging  theory  ;  the  second,  though 
cramped  perhaps  a  little  by  that  theory,  is  still  the  first 
honest  attempt  to  take  the  facts  of  the  subject  from  the 
beginning,  and  at  least  adjust  theory  to  them.  Previously 
this  could  not  be  done.  Of  the  beneficent  effects  of  the 
process — the  only  process  really  possible  or  profitable — 
we  have  seen  something  in  Chatterton  ;  we  are  post- 
poning two  other  examples — in  practice,  not  in  theory, — 
those  of  Burns  and  Blake.  But  it  is  necessary  to 
remember  that  all  the  great  writers  of  the  Romantic 
movement  were  affected  by  this  resurrection  of  the  past. 


576  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  BOOKVIII 

For  in  these  studies,  as  in  almost  all  others  of  the  human 
kind,  the  future  is  merely  a  blank,  and  the  present  is 
partly  a  puzzle.  In  them,  more  than  in  others,  the  past 
is  a  possession.  We  have  it,  and  if  we  choose  we  may 
know  and  understand  it.  Without  such  knowledge  we 
shall  never  decipher  the  puzzle  of  the  present,  or  be 
ready  to  understand  the  writing  that  is  to  fill  the  blank 
of  the  future.  With  it  we  have  kept  our  hold  on  the 
life  of  the  subject,  and  are  prepared  for  whatever  that 
life  may  bring. 


INDEX 


VOL.  II 


577 


INDEX 


ADDISON,  182,  224,  278,  474-7,  488, 

502 

Agincourt,  Drayton's,  102 
Aglaura,  137 

Akenside,  386,  490-92,  511-13 
Albion's  England ',  no 
Alexandrines,  16,  43,  51,  90,  95,  98- 

loo,  149,  392,  568 
Alls  Well  that  Ends  Well,  24-5 
"  Alresford  Pool,"  123 
Amphibrach,  suggestions  of,  144  note 
Anapaestic  verse,  322,  413-435.  533  S4- 
Ancram,  Lord,  126 
Andromana,  319 

"Anne  Killigrew"  ode,  the,  381,  403 
Annus  Mirabilis,  365-7 
Anstey,  431,  534 
Antony  and  Cleopatra,  39,  40 
Arber,  Mr.,  169  note 
Arcadia  poems,  93-6 
Aristotle,  203 
Armstrong,  485,  486 
Ascham,  170  sq. 
Ashmole,  346 
Ashton,  R. ,  440  note 
Astrcea  Redux,  363,  364 
Astrophel  and  Stella,  93-6 
As  You  Like  It,  34,  35 
Aughrim,  The  Battle  of,  440  note 
"A.  W.,"  134 
Ayres,  394,  400 
Ayton,  Sir  R. ,  126 

Bacon,  170 

Bain,  Professor,  44 

Baldwin,  188  sy. 

Ballad,  the,  523-8 

Bancks,  400 

Barnes,  B. ,  148,  151,  152 

Barn  field,  119 

Baron,  355 

Baudelaire,  318 

Basse,  125 

Beattie,  125,  510  note 

Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  54,  135,  302-4 


Beaumont,  Sir  John,  108,  277-9 

Beaumont,  Joseph,  342 

Behn,  A.,  295,  417 

Benlowes,  342  note 

Bentley,  154  note 

Blair,  492 

Blake,  391,  500,  541 

Blank    verse,    3-56,    67-86,    224-72, 

302-20,  353-4,  369-71,  473-99,  568 
Blennerhassett,  189  sq. 
Bond,  Mr.  Warwick,  125  note 
Boswell,  451 
Bridges,  Mr.  R. ,  257  sq. 
Brightland,  543 
Britain's  Ida,  115  note 
Britannia's  Pastorals,  118  sq, 
Brome,  309 
Broome,  456,  476 
Browne,  Sir  J.,  135  note,  329 
Browne,  W. ,  117-22,  156 
Browning,  56,  391 
Bullen,  Mr.,  77  note,  and  Bk.  V.  Chap. 

IV.  notes  passim,  332 
Burke,  388 
Burney,  F. ,  85,  529 
Burning  Babe,  The,  no 
Butler,  414-28,  443 
Byrom,  431,  509,  534 
Bysshe,  192  note,  262,  268,  278,  361, 

401,   417  note,   438,  452,   493  note, 

525.  537-42.  556,  558,  570 

Campion,  1-55,  139-45-  172^-,  183-5, 
187,  193  note,  255,  514  note 

Canning,  387 

Carducci,  91  note,  102  note,  215  note 

Carew,  328-30 

Carey,  H.,  530 

Catiline,  70 

Cato,  488 

Chalkhill,  295  sq. 

Chamberlayne,  128,  237,  282,  295  sq. 

Chapman,  72-4,  107-14,  193,  436 

Chatterton,  114,  520-23,  527,  555 
note 


579 


58o 


INDEX 


Chaucer,  4,  117,  201,  208,  256,  269 

note,  388,  437 
Chesterfield,  528,  529 
Christabel,  521,  541,  554 
Churchill,  386,  464,  468 
Cokain,  316 

Coleridge,  385,  522,  527,  554,  562 
Collins,  W. ,  47  note,  55,  277,  514-16, 

559 

Comedy  of  Errors,  The,  13-16 
Comus,  223-35 

Congreve,  400,  405,  406,  487,  514 
Coriolanus,  39,  40 

Couplet,  the  octosyllabic,  61,  413-435 
Couplet,    the    decasyllabic,    62,    101, 

273-300,  352-3,  367,  and  Bk.  VII. 

Chap.    I.   passim,   406-12,    440-44, 

447-71,  568-74 
Courthope,  Mr.,  279 
Cowley,  157,  286-93,  33**  sq-i  402 
Cowper,  425,  433,  468-76,  495-9,  508 

note,  510,  519-20,  532,  533 
Crabbe,  465-8,  471 
Crashaw,  291,  330-32 
Croft,  Mr.,  181  note 
Crowne,  407,  440  note,  487 
Cumberland,  154  note 
Cymbeline,  46,  47 

Daniel,  89,  104,    105,    108,    148,   171, 

185-7,  193  note,  203  - 
Dante,  150 
Davenant,  88,  107,  312-14,   342,   345 

note,  362,  374,  517 
Davenport,  309 
Davies,  89,  105,  106 
Davison's  Poetical  Rhapsody,  133,  134 
Day,  82,  83 
Dekker,  75,  76,  136 
Denham,  286,  293-4,  437>  5^2 
Dionysius  (of  Halicarnassus),  222 
Dobell,  Mr.  Bertram,  46  note 
Dobson,  Mr.  Austin,  424,  426,  478 
Donne,  89,   108,    128  note,   130,   131, 

158-66,  193,  291,  322  sq. ,  420 
Dorset.     See  Sackville 
Drant,  171  sq. 
Drayton,  89,  97-104,   108,   146,   148, 

194,  342,  425 

"  Drink  to  me  only,"  153-55 
Drummond,  126-28,  193,  279 
Dryden,  98,  107,  149,   236,   262,  275, 

279,  280,  282,  285,  289,   342,   346, 

359-91,  Bk.    VII.   Chaps.    II.    and 

III.  passim,  436,  437,  440-44,  449, 

455-7-  463-71.  487.  501,  517.  537 

sq.,  562 
Duke,  501 
D'Urfey,  422 
Dyer,  89,  486  note,  533 


"E.  K.,"  179 

Ellis,  G.,  384 

Elton,  Professor,  viii. ,  97  sq.,  194  note 

England's  Helicon,  133-4 

England 's  Parnassus,  133,  196 

English  Parnassus,  The,  345,  346 

Erasmus,  171 

Essay  on  Criticism,  Pope's,  392,  452 

Evans's  Ballads,  527 

Example  of  Virtue,  The,  169  note 

Fairfax,  275-7,  449 

Fall  of  Mortimer,   The,  71 

Fenton,  456,  476 

Ferrers,  187  sq. 

Fifine  at  the  Fair,  99  note 

Fitzgerald,  E. ,  107 

Flatman,  400 

Fletcher,    G.    and    F. ,    115-17,    161, 

426,  492  note 
Fletcher,    John,    213   note,    231    note, 

302-4 
Fogg,  550 
Ford,  305,  306 
Foster,  Dr.  John,  544  note 
Fourteener,  the,  18,  61,  108-14,  5°8 
Fraunce,  178,  193 

Gamely  n,  113 

Garth,  449 

Gascoigne,    5    note,    53,   in,    190-93, 

195,  197,  200,  240  note,  565 
Gay,  478,  504,  505 
Gifford,  Humphrey,  420  note 
Gifford,  W.,  154  note 
Gildon,  541,  543 
Giraldus,  Lilius,  170 
Glapthorne,  310,  311 
Glover,  492-5 
Godric,  268 
Goff,  316 
Golding,  109 
Goldsmith,   465,    518,   519,  551   note, 

561  note 

Gondibert,  342,  362 
Gosse,  Mr. ,  77  note 
Gosson,  178 
Granville,  505,  506 
Gray,  406,  510,  516-18,  553-56 
Greville,  Fulke,  90-92 
Greville,  Mrs.,  529 
Guest,    Dr.,   39,  215,   244,  249,  262, 

268 

Halifax,  403 

Hamlet,  42,  43 

Hammond,  516,  517 

Hannay,  Pat.,  126,  127,  345  note 

Harris  ("Hermes"),  545 

Harvey,  Gab.,  172  sq.,  182 


INDEX 


581 


Hawes,  169  note,  200 

Henry  IV.,  29,  30 

Henry  V. ,  37,  38 

Henry  VI. ,  10  note,  28  and  note 

Henry  VIII.,  38 

Herbert,  George,  332 

Herbert,  Lord,  333 

Heredia,  J.  M.  de,  127 

Hero  and  Leander,  97 

Heroic  Play,  the,  367  sq. 

Herrick,  325-8 

Herries,  546 

Heywood,  80,  81 

Higgins,  187  sq. 

Hobbes,  362 

Homer,  Chapman's,  108-114 

Homer,  Pope's,  456,  457 

Hooker,  270 

Hoole,  458 

Horace,  212  note 

Howard,  Sir  R. ,  371  note 

Howell,  192  note 

Hudibras,  414 

Hughes,  503,  504 

Hugo,  V.,  271 

Hume,  Captain  T.,  138 

Hymns,  eighteenth-century,  530-33 

Ibbot,  474  note 

In  Memoriam  form,  the,  90,  131  note, 
156  note,  158,  333 

James  (VI).  I.,  191-2  note 

"J.  D.,"  345,  346,  437 

Johnson,  Dr.,  21,  151,  214,  218  sq., 
224,  244,  270,  278,  284,  286  sq. , 
402,  405,  424,  455,  457,  460-63, 
467,  480,  485,  489  note,  505,  511 
sq.,  515  sq.,  556-61 

Jonson,  Ben,  68-72,  114,  115,  135, 

I53-S8,  178,  193-  322  •*?•.  344- 

420,  437,  502 
Julian,  Mr.,  531  note 
Julius  Casar,  39,  40 

Kames,  Lord,  545 

Keats,  117,  217 

Ker,  Professor,  viii,  436  note 

King,  Bp. ,  520 

King  John,  26,  27 

King  Lear,  44,  45 

King,  William  (1663-1712),  417 

King,  William  (1685-1763),  286  note, 

417.  505 
Knox,  Vic.,  214 
Koeppel,  Dr.  E.,  305  note 
Kynaston,  125,  342,  351 

La  Harpe,  139 
L Allegro,  212  sq. 


Lamb,  71,  80  note 

Landor,  71 

Lane,  John,  213  note 

Langbaine,  90 

Langhorne,  530 

Langton,  451 

Layamon,  413 

Lee,  Nat,  370,  407,  487 

Lee,  Mr.  Sidney,  146  note,  148 

Leigh  Hunt,  80  note 

Leoline  and  Sydanis,  125 

Lewis,  D. ,  529 

Lillo,  489  note 

Lodge,  132,  178 

Longfellow,  336 

Longinus,  222,  408,  452,  454 

Love's  Labour's  Lost,  16-19 

Lucrece,  The  Rape  of,  58,  59 

Lust's  Dominion,  520 

Lycidas,  218-24 

Lydgate,  274 

Macaulay,  100  note 
Macbeth,  41,  42 
Maginn,  422  note 
Mainwaring,  544 
Maittaire,  543  note 

Marlowe  and  his  group,    their    blank 
verse,    6-9,    21,    30,    32,     60,    96, 

97 

Marmion,  S. ,  295  sq. ,  347  note 
Marston,  74,  75 

Marvell,  236  note,  286,  335,  407 
Mary  Ambree,  421 
Mason,  John,  561-3 
Mason,  W. ,  518  note 
Massinger,  304,  305 
Masson,  Prof.,  238 
Measure  for  Measure,  34 
Melton,  Mr.  W.  F.,  161  note,  165 
Mennis,  Sir  John,  414  note 
Merchant  of  Venice,  The,  32 
Meres,  Bk.  V.  Chap.  I.  passim 
"  Mermaid"  Series,  82  note 
Merry  Wives  of  Windsor,  The,  34 
Messiah,  Pope's,  451 
Metastasio,  102  note 
Me"zeray,  Prior's  lines  in,  432-4 
Mickle,  527,  528 
Middleton,  78-80 
Midsummer  Nighfs  Dream,  A,  22-4, 

213 

Milford,  Mr.,  499 
Milton,    52,    56,    140,     193,    207-72, 

354.  356,  377.  386,   408,  425.   442. 

Bk.  VIII.  Chaps.  II.  and  IV.  passim 
Mirror  for  Magistrates,  The,  187-91 
Mitford,  102  note,  240  note,  563-6,  575 
Monboddo,  Lord,  545,  546 
Montgomerie,  126,  421  note 


582 


INDEX 


Moore,  401 

Morris,  W. ,  120,  123,  386 

Much  Ado  About  Nothing,  35,  36 

Mulgrave,    399,  408,   409,    436,  437, 

5°4 
"  My  Winifreda,"  529 

Nabbes,  310 

Nares,  550,  552 

Nash,  181,  182 

Nativity,  Milton's,  209  sq. 

Nero,  317 

Niccols,  187  sq. 

Night  Thoughts,  The,  488  sq. 

Nolan,  Mr.  T.  H.,  556  note 

Occleve,  117 
Oldham,  407 
Omond,  Mr.  T.  S. ,  167  note,  170  note, 

537  note,  and  Bk.  VIII.  Chap.  IV. 

passim 

Othello,  45,  46 
Otway,  370,  399,  403,  487 
Oxford  Spectator,  The,  556  note 

Paradise  Lost,  235-50 

Paradise  Regained,  250-52 

Parnell,  502 

Passionate  Pilgrim,  The,  65  note     . 

Pastorals,  Pope's,  451 

Pemberton,  493  note,  544,  552 

Penseroso,  II,  212  sq. 

Percy,  524  sq. 

Pericles,  47,  48 

Phaer,  109,  187  sq. 

Pharonnida,  121,  237,  295  sq.,  361 

Philomela,  127 

Philips,  A.,  524,  525 

Philips,  John,  475,  484 

Philips,  K. ,  394,  395 

"  Phillida  flouts  me,"  335  sq. 

Philostratus,  154 

Phcenix  Nest,  The,  130-33 

"  Pindaric,"  337-42,  402-7 

Pitt,  C.  and  W.,  465 

Polyolbion,  98-100 

Pomfret,  409-441 

Pope,    278,    359,    383,   386  sq.,    401, 

409,    447-60   and  rest   of  chapters 

passim,  503,  545 
Prior,    401,    423-35.    443.    478,    5O1- 

Si4.  545.  57i 
Pulteney,  528 

Puttenham,  181-2,  194,  346 
"Pyrrha"  poem,  the,   212  note,   255 

note 

Quatrain,  the  "heroic,"  106 
Raleigh,  89,  90 


Raleigh,  Professor,  192  note 

Randolph,  309 

Rape  of  the  Lock,  The,  453 

Rawlins,  T.,  318 

Reliques,  Percy's,  524  sq. 

RewlisandCautelis,  King  James's,  191, 

192  note 

Richard  II.,  29-30 
Richard  III.,  28,  29 
Robertson,  Mr.  Logic,  491 
Rochester,  395,  396,  417 
Romance-six,  the,  435 
Romeo  and  Juliet,  20-22 
Ronsard,  191 
Roscommon,  408,  437,  474,  475,  482, 

484 

Rossetti,  D.  G.,  217 
Rowe,  487,  488,  502-3 
Rowley,  W.,  77-8 

Sackville,  C.  (Dorset),  397,  409 

Sackville,  T. ,  397  note 

Sad  Shepherd,  The,  70 

St.  Mary  Magdalene,  116  note 

Samson  Agonistes,  252-7 

Sandys,  279,  280,  437 

Sapphics,  English,  91,  132,  133 

Satiric  verse,  Elizabethan,  128  note 

Savage,  463 

Say,  545 

Sayers,  550 

Scott  of  Am  well,  214 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  366  note,   389,  449 

note,  521,  522 
Sedley,  395 
Sejanus,  69 
Shadwell,  494 
Shakespeare,    3-65,    68,    70,    So,    81, 

83-6,  135, "148,  208,  217,  225,  266, 

268,  270,  302-4,   369  sq. ,  386,   487 

sq.,  492  note,  541,  566  sq. 
Shelley,  56 
Shenstone,   263,   267,   431,    498,   499, 

5°3-  5°9.  5I°.  522.  545.  552.  553- 

576 

Sheretine  and  Mariana,  127 
Sheridan  (the  elder),  546,  547 
Shipley,  Mr.  Orby,  382  note 
Shirley,  H.,  317 
Shirley,  J.,  86,  306-8 
Sidney,  92-6,  99  note,  148,  149,  178 
Sigurd,  113 

Sirena,  Drayton's,  102  note,  104 
"Skeleton  in  Armour,  The,"  336 
Skelton,  170,  414  note 
Smart,  513,  514 
Smith,  Dr.,  414  note 
Smith,  Edmund,  476,  515 
Smith,  Prof.  Gregory,  viii,  170  note 
Somerville,  485,  486 


INDEX 


583 


Songs,  Shakespeare's,  63-5 

Song  to  David,  The,  513 

Sonnets  (Shakespeare's),  59-61 ;  others, 
95>  T45-53  •'  Milton's,  215-18 

Soulary,  J. ,  127 

Southey,  527 

Southwell,  no 

Spenser,  19,  88-9,  and  Bk.  V.  Chap. 
III.  passim,  148,  161,  174,  177, 
179,  190,  196  sq. ,  203,  208,  219, 
266,  268,  322  sq.,  386,  420,  437, 
482,  483,  510,  511,  521,  541,  554, 
555.  566  sq. 

Sprat,  402 

Spring  Rice,  Mr.,  77  note 

Standen,  477 

Stanyhurst,  172  sq. 

Steele,  Joshua,  547-9,  552,  573 

Steel  Glass,  The,  5  note 

Stepney,  409 

Stevenson,  Mr.  George,  126 

Stichomythia,  8 

Stirling,  Lord,  126-8 

Suckling,  311,  312 

Surrey,  5 

Swift,  404,  405,  418,  419 

Swinburne,  Mr.,  73  note,  91  note,  108, 
379,  417  note,  541  note 

Sylvester,  125 

"T.  L.  gent,"  132 

Taming  of  the  Shrew,  The,  35 

Tancred  and  Gismund,  15  note 

Tasso,  275-7 

Taylor,  Sir  H.,  71 

Tempest,  The,  33 

Tennyson,  52,  56,  71,  268,  271,  272 

Thackeray,  23,  178,  424,  506  note 

Thealma  and  Clearchus,  97,  121 

Thompson,  Rev.  W. ,  501 

Thomson   (the   elder),    56,   271,    473, 

475)    478-84   and    rest   of    chapter 

passim,  214 
Tickell,  455,  506 
Timon  of  Athens,  39 
Titus  Andronicus,  9-13 


Toplady,  531,  532 

Tourneur,  81,  82 

Troilus  and  Cressida,  38,  39 

Tucker,  546 

Tusser,  419 

Twelfth  Night,  35 

Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,  18-19 

Tyrwhitt,  548,  549,  575 

University  Wits,  their  line,  6-9 
Urquhart,  Sir  T.,  347 

Vanity  of  Human    Wishes,  455,   461, 

462 

Venus  and  Adonis,  57,  58 
Vida,  155 
Virgil,  385 

Waller,  Mr.  A.  R. ,  423  note 

Waller,  E.,  275,  280-86,  449 

Wallis,  345  note 

Walpole,  H.,  555  note 

Walsh,  401,  402,  417 

Warner,  no 

Warton,  no  note,  460,  554 

Watson,  T.  (sonneteer),  95 

Watson,    T. ,    "verser"    and    bishop, 

139,  171  sq. 
Watts,    402,    432,    477,    506-9,    542, 

543 

Webb,  545,  553  note 
Webbe,  178-81 
Webster,  76,  77 
Wesley,  Ch. ,  531 
Wilkins,  G. ,  77  note 
Winter's  Tale,  The,  36,  37 
Wither,  121,  122-4 
Wordsworth,  217,  258,  385,  497 
Wotton,  Sir  H. ,  235 

Yalden,  405 

Young,  Bar.,  133 

Young,  Edward,  463,  486-90 

Young,  Walter,  549,  550 

Zepheria,  147 


THE    END 


Printed  by  R.  &  R.  CI.ARK,  LIMITED,  Edinburgh. 


A    HISTORY    OF 

ENGLISH  PROSODY 

FROM    THE    TWELFTH    CENTURY 
TO    THE    PRESENT    DAY 

By    PROFESSOR    GEORGE    SAINTSBURY 
Three  Vols.     Svo. 

VOL.      I.    FROM  THE  ORIGINS  TO  SPENSKR.    los.  net 
VOL.    II.    FROM   SHAKESPEARE   TO    CRABBE. 
VOL.  III.    In  preparation. 

SOME   PRESS   OPINIONS   ON    VOLUME   I. 

THE   ATHENAEUM 

"  A  thing  complete  and  convincing  beyond  any  former  work  from  the  same 
hand.  '  Hardly  any  one  who  takes  a  sufficient  interest  in  prosody  to  induce  him 
to  read  this  book  '  will  fail  to  find  it  absorbing,  and  even  entertaining,  as  only 
one  other  book  on  the  subject  of  versification  is :  the  '  Petit  Traite  de  Poesie 
Francaise '  of  Theodore  de  Banville.  .  .  .  We  await  the  second  and  third 
volumes  of  this  admirable  undertaking  with  impatience.  To  stop  reading  it  at 
the  end  of  the  first  volume  leaves  one  in  just  such  a  state  of  suspense  as  if  it  had 
been  a  novel  of  adventure,  and  not  the  story  of  the  adventures  of  prosody. 
'  I  am  myself  quite  sure,'  says  Prof.  Saintsbury,  '  that  English  prosody  is,  and 
has  been,  a  living  thing,  for  seven  hundred  years  at  least.'  That  he  sees  it 
living  is  his  supreme  praise,  and  such  praise  belongs  to  him  only  among 
historians  of  English  verse." 

THE  TIMES 

"  To  Professor  Saintsbury  English  prosody  is  a  living  thing,  and  not  an 
abstraction.  He  has  read  poetry  for  pleasure  long  before  he  began  to  read  it 
with  a  scientific  purpose,  and  so  he  has  learnt  what  poetry  is  before  making 
up  his  mind  what  it  ought  to  be.  It  is  a  common  fault  of  writers  upon  prosody 
that  they  set  out  to  discover  the  laws  of  music  without  ever  training  their  ears 
to  apprehend  music.  They  theorize  very  plausibly  at  large,  but  they  betray 
their  incapacity  so  soon  as  they  proceed  to  scan  a  difficult  line.  Professor 
Saintsbury  never  fails  in  this  way.  He  knows  a  good  line  from  a  bad  one,  and 
lie  knows  how  a  good  line  ought  to  be  read,  even  though  he  may  sometimes  be 
doubtful  how  it  ought  to  be  scanned.  He  has,  therefore,  the  knowledge  most 
essential  to  a  writer  upon  prosody.  .  .  .  His  object,  as  he  constantly  insists,  is 
to  write  a  history,  to  tell  us  what  has  happened  to  our  prosody  from  the  time 
when  it  began  to  be  English  and  ceased  to  be  Anglo-Saxon ;  not  to  tell  us 
whether  it  has  happened  rightly  or  wrongly,  nor  even  to  be  too  ready  to  tell  us 
why  or  how  it  has  happened." 

Professor  W.  P.  KER  in  the  SCOTTISH  HISTORICAL  REVIEW 

"  The  history  of  verse,  as  Mr.  Saintsbury  takes  it,  is  one  aspect  of  the  history 
of  poetry ;  that  is  to  say,  the  minute  examination  of  structure  does  not  leave 
out  of  account  the  nature  of  the  living  thing  ;  we  are  not  kept  all  the  time  at  the 
microscope.  This  is  the  great  beauty  of  his  book ;  it  is  a  history  of  English 
poetry  in  one  particular  form  or  mode.  .  .  .  The  author  perceives  that  the  form 
of  verse  is  not  separable  from  the  soul  of  poetry  ;  poetry  '  has  neither  kernel  nor 
husk,  but  is  all  one,'  to  adapt  the  phrase  of  another  critic." 

LONDON:    MACMILLAN    AND    CO.,    LTD. 


THE   ACADEMY 

"  It  is  a  careful  attempt,  based  upon  an  exhaustive  examination  of  the  whole 
of  the  available  material,  to  do  for  English  Literature  what  has  never  yet  been 
done  in  any  systematic  or  co-ordinate  fashion.  When  the  three  volumes  of 
which  the  work  is  to  consist  are  published,  a  blank  in  the  history  of  our 
literature  will  have  been  filled.  .  .  .  That  the  work  will  bring  peace  in  the  '  fair 
field  full  of  fighting  folk '  whereon  modern  scholars  of  Prosody  '  clang  battleaxe 
and  clash  brand,'  is  not  to  be  hoped  ;  rather  will  it  bring  a  sword,  for  the  central 
idea  of  the  book  runs  counter  to  many  widely-received  and  much-debated  theories. 
We  have  no  desire  to  enter  upon  the  field,  and  will  content  ourselves  with  saying 
that  after  a  careful  study  of  the  book,  after  checking  it  again  and  again  in  the 
light  of  opposing  views,  we  have  little  hesitation  in  stating  that  Professor 
Saintsbury  has  set  the  history  of  English  prosody  upon  a  firm  basis,  largely 
because  he  has  remembered  '  that  the  Rule  comes  from  the  Work,  not  the  Work 
from  the  Rule,'  and  because  he  has  been  wise  enough  to  take  his  examples  from 
amongst  the  experimenters  in  novelty  just  as  readily  as  from  the  writings  of  the 
great.  .  .  .  The  present  instalment  has  convinced  us  that  the  whole  subject  is 
being  dealt  with  in  masterly  fashion,  and  we  are  confident  that  the  remaining 
volumes  will  be  worthy  of  their  theme.  For  Professor  Saintsbury  has  that 
quality  which  made  Hazlitt  one  of  the  first  of  critics,  he  has  gusto,  he  loves 
literature." 

THE  OXFORD  MAGAZINE 

"The  first  volume  of  Professor  Saintsbury's  History  establishes  itself  at 
once  as  the  standard  work  on  the  subject.  .  .  .  His  treatment  is  thoroughly 
exhaustive,  and  is  distinguished  by  his  wide  learning  and  his  usual  skill  in  the 
handling  of  vast  masses  of  detail.  The  book  is  not  only  a  history  of  prosody. 
The  student  might  do  worse  than  take  it  as  quite  a  useful  guide  through  the 
rich  but  confusing  store  of  poetry  of  the  twelfth  to  the  fourteenth  century.  For 
the  author  has  adopted  the  admirable  plan  of  giving  in  his  copious  footnotes 
not  only  illustrations  of  his  judgments,  but  also  valuable  information  as  to  the 
best  available  printed  form  in  which  the  work  he  discusses  is  to  be  found." 

THE   MORNING    POST 

"  Most  of  the  books  yet  written  on  English  prosody  are  prosy.  Professor 
Saintsbury's  '  history  '  (at  any  rate  in  this  first  volume)  is  never  prosy,  and  is 
frequently  even  breezy.  One  might  think  it  almost  impossible  that  a  competent 
critic,  who  regards  his  work  seriously,  should  discuss  the  most  difficult  and 
controversial  points  of  early  English  versification  in  so  lively  a  spirit  without 
detracting  from  the  quality  of  his  work.  But  Professor  Saintsbury  has  attained 
this  desirable  end,  and  his  comments  on  some  of  those  ancient  or  modern 
experts  with  whom  he  happens  to  differ  on  matters  of  metre  or  rhyme  are  fully 
charged  with  attic  salt.  ...  A  work  which,  if  the  whole  is  as  excellent  as  this 
first  part,  will  be  a  highly  valuable  addition  to  history  and  criticism  in  a  diffi- 
cult and  comparatively  little-studied  field  of  literary  inquiry." 

THE    DAILY   NEWS 

"  It  is  difficult  tp  imagine  anyone  better  qualified  than  Professor  Saintsbury 
to  undertake  a  work  of  such  highly  specialised  character  as  a  detailed  historical 
study  of  English  prosody.  He  has  wide  knowledge  and  remarkable  power  of 
research,  as  well  as  a  capacity  to  handle  thorny  problems  with  convincing 
originality,  and,  above  all,  an  unconquerable  enthusiasm  for  a  subject  which  to 
many,  even  among  those  who  know  and  love  English  poetry,  mnst  seem  dull  and 
uninspiring.  He  makes  the  dry  bones  live." 


LONDON  :    MACMILLAN    AND    CO.,    LTD. 

N.  1300.7.08. 


University  of  California 

SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 

405  Hilgard  Avenue,  Los  Angeles,  CA  90024-1388 

Return  this  material  to  the  library 

from  which  it  was  borrowed. 


AUG  2  5 1994 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


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